Based on your comments, it seems like you're trying to spread FUD?
The stats page you linked to explains exactly what's going on. These spam PLC identities have nothing to do with with the tens of millions of real Bluesky registered users.
Either you misunderstood or you're being intentionally dishonest.
You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.
It is confusing to say "users" when it is actually "accounts", humans tend to associate "user" with another human, where as "account" can cover people and bots (many on atproto)
I would counterpoint that a non-insignificant number of the accounts are spam/bots. Jaz's stats overestimate because it does not remove certain accounts which have been takedown/deleted, let alone those that remain. I have shared analysis of this on HN, Bluesky, and Discord to avoid making educated guesses.
The reality is that a significant chunk (>50%) was Blue MAGA, or turned off by them, and I see little prospect that they will reactivate. Outside of the Bluesky echo chamber, there is a deep brand association with Bluesky being primarily political refugees. They see Bluesky as the left-wing Truth Social. I've asked hundreds of people IRL if they have heard of Bluesky, they are far more likely to have this brand association than to have heard of "atproto" (more than half vs 1-2% / can count on one hand).
Sure, it may overestimate the exact count, but that doesn't change the fact that tens of millions of real people have downloaded Bluesky and signed up.
Right now, Bluesky has one large community, which is already great for some people but not most people. Once Bluesky adds Communities, new communities can form, making it interesting to the other 90% of people who were excited initially and then turned off by it being "one note".
I think your association with Blueksy is painting a rosier picture for yourself than reality portends. Do you know how many of those accounts never added a profile picture or even liked a single post? Do you think people are likely to reactivate to something they checked out once and has only shrunk since? Can ActivityPub/Mastodon add some new feature that will reactivate all the people who tried that out and moved on?
If you'd like to crawl the network to get real data, I built this a while ago https://github.com/verdverm/atmunge (it will take a few days to get sufficient data to do analysis, due to rate-limits)
Certainly Bluesky has stats about mobile app installs / usage. If they were good, they would be sharing those instead of the /users/accounts/ number that feels good but hides the reality. The first step (imo) would be to stop trying to deny reality and start asking why it is the reality. Only then can corrections be made. I don't think the core issues are technical, a missing feature, or a social media modality that was supposed to be built in the atmosphere. (other than my strongly held opinion that public-by-default was the wrong choice and bolting on permissioned spaces now is not a right answer)
I'm personally waiting on the next attempt that learns from AP/AT/Nostr, but makes privacy first core. I think it will be a few years still. Right now more people are shunning social media across the board, it's all so toxic and polarizing regardless of modality and where you use it.
I'm not claiming to know what reality portends, but I do think my guess is about as good as anyone's.
Bluesky did something ActivityPub/Mastodon never did, which is reach a mainstream audience of non-technical people. But its growth has been severely limited for one reason: the network is niche and uninteresting to most people.
Communities are a potential solution to this problem. If they work, it is plausible that tens of millions of users reactivate and, eventually, hundreds of millions of people join the network.
Why do you project 10% growth over the next 6 months? Looking at the other metrics on that page which have history (total unique likers, posters, followers), the numbers are flat or declining.
That shape doesn’t seem great for a social media company.
Arguing that success is purely about the ultra high numbers seems to miss the forest for the trees. Is HN a failure because it did not reach the level of DAU as Reddit? The quality of discussion and community here is certainly substantially higher. I feel the same about Mastodon and Bsky vs Twitter. I’ll take community I actually want to engage with over sheer numbers any day.
Great question, and I'll let someone with deeper technical understanding answer this, but using Wikipedia as a reference (1), it looks like "fediverse" is a bit loosely defined, with parts of it not being fully compatible with all of the other networks (2).
You may already have a list of public domain movies, but I wrote a query to find the ones on Wikimedia Commons [1] :) WikiFlix [2] is a nicer interface for browsing them
Despite the site being free and open source, people still send me a few bucks each month, and very nice thank-you emails. And there are at least 2-3 sites out there that I'm personally a fan of that used it.
