The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR:
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.
That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
Some of the worst of the pile-on, scolding, pearl clutching behaviors that made everyone very glad to see certain people leave other platforms make large swathes of bsky totally worthless. It's like a mashup of the worst parts of reddit and twitter.
There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."
Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.
It's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there.
What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
I didn't wanna cite the Fortune article I got it from because it cited research from a group called "Whop" that didn't have the full data available. But here's the article I read
I do vaguely recall a more serious study showing a vast majority of kids thinking "influencer" was a viable career path and a very large portion beleiving it was the only viable career path for them. It also found that these percentages were higher in boys than in girls. That's the study I was trying to find but failed and found this instead
Does anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her?
I loved her compilations.
Sponsored by bluesky
The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR:
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.
That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
Some of the worst of the pile-on, scolding, pearl clutching behaviors that made everyone very glad to see certain people leave other platforms make large swathes of bsky totally worthless. It's like a mashup of the worst parts of reddit and twitter.
There are a couple nooks and crannies that are worthwhile, but at scale it's not a good place. The vibe is "something went wrong" and "poor decisions have led me here" and not "warm, welcoming, vibrant, innovative community of wonderful people."
Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.
It's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there.
What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
Steady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers.
social network, and to some degree open internet, is a millennial thing, it will die out as millennials get older.
A poll of gen alpha (aged 12-15) from 2024 asked about job aspirations:
Something so grim should be accompanied by its citation, just so we can check it's not a windup
I didn't wanna cite the Fortune article I got it from because it cited research from a group called "Whop" that didn't have the full data available. But here's the article I read
https://fortune.com/article/gen-alpha-dream-careers-youtuber...
EDIT: now that I'm looking more into it, I think this YouGov poll was the original source https://today.yougov.com/technology/articles/39997-influence...
I do vaguely recall a more serious study showing a vast majority of kids thinking "influencer" was a viable career path and a very large portion beleiving it was the only viable career path for them. It also found that these percentages were higher in boys than in girls. That's the study I was trying to find but failed and found this instead
two decades ago it would have been:
Youtube / tiktok are just the equivalent for that age in this day & age.I’d argue those aren’t really because of the social aspects of Youtube or TikTok.
Why? At least currently I don't feel this way about them.
Anecdata—as one of the oldest millennials, I have seen a very steep drop off in social network usage amongst my peers. Too much IRL family stuff.
I tend to agree — but is there any data on this?
Bluesky? Fediverse? Really?
X or Bsky will likely evolve/become replaced by the social network where every tweet is an instant poll, here's a mockup I found:
https://x.com/MaskedMelonUsk/status/1987338574606356901?s=20