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Over the past few months, traffic to the site formerly known as Twitter has taken a nosedive as competitors like Bluesky and Threads continue to bring in more and more users.
According to the traffic-estimating service Similarweb, visits to the Elon Musk-owned social network now known as X have plummeted over the past three months.
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Mastodon was right there. It’s like people haven’t learned anything from their experience with Twitter.
One, the whole signup thing is user hostile. Just picking an instance seems like a huge decision.
Two, the people I want to read updates from are not there. They are in Bluesky though, at least for the most part.
Three, the people that are there are huge argumentative jackasses that get into nerd slap fight over nothing all the fucking time.
Four, it’s just not that fun.
Bluesky is far easier to get into if you come from Twitter
Yup, you just make an account and you’re there, like everything else they e ever signed up for.
The fediverse is too obscure for the average person to just jump into from Twitter. You can explain it as simply as you want, as soon as you say words like server and instance, or even abstracts like comparing it to email, they’ll have no fucking idea and their eyes will just glaze over.
Bluesky is singularly cohesive, one account, one service, like every other account they’ve ever made anywhere else. The people still on sites like Twitter are those that don’t want to learn, they just want to consume.
It’s easier even if you don’t. The different feeds make it a lot easier than the void of mastodon you must curate.
Edit: for example, check this out
Mastodon didn’t allow referer headers, so it was invisible in tracking metrics. People looking to see where their traffic came from would see Bluesky as some percentage, but won’t see mastodon servers at all.
I tried to dig into Masto and I like it, but none of the journos I want to see live updates from are on it. Which is fine for just regular scrolling but for something like the unfolding Luigi Mangione story I wanted up to date information and I didn’t have to slum it on Twitter to get it. Bluesky works for that.
For normal scrolling Bluesky kinda blows. It’s just millions of brunchlibs screaming into the void with memes they find on Facebook. It’s not that interesting. Still better than Twitter, but not as good as Mastodon.
It really depends on how much of a particular niche community made the jump. Historians and astronomers? Bluesky is just great. Infosec? Mostly on mastodon. ML? Most are still on Twitter unfortunately.
