It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)
Hasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though.
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
Point to publically posted bs links or embeds please then. Not F2F shares. That's what I am talking about. X and FB have those in droves and they are a real growth driver.
Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances.
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
On that note there's also https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers).
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone.
You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything.
People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs.
That said, I did try to get some of my work in Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app bookhive.buzz or the annotation service seams.co , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need.
Social movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
> I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
- asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising
Iâm not too sure what Blueskyâs approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as âeveryone is on Twitterâ
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change itâs nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just donât know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
Iâm not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the âinvite people you knowâ problem, and thatâs good enough for most of the world. The problem of âsomewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen inâ is solved with scientific publications, âcan I join inâ is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals weâre pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). Thatâs all pretty key for building applications.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
Fear of AI scrape? I'm just amused at the idea of my words ending up manipulating chatbots to rewrite stuff that I've written, force-feeding it in some distorted form to people silly enough to listen.
If you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? Howâs that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites?
If you donât want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
This is not an answer to your question, but one issue is that if you write about some niche sort of thing (as you do, on a self-hosted blog) that no one else is really writing about, the LLM will take it as a sole source on the topic and serve up its take almost word for word.
That's clearly plagiarism, but it's also interesting to me as there's really no way the user who's querying their fav. ai chatbot if the answer has truthiness.
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
From what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections.
I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.
Because access to the internet is inequitably distributed throughout society, it is inherently problematic for any privileged class members (e.g. men, white people) to stay on the internet at all.
Big events in sports and politics are what drive growth for most social networks. You can almost map every growth spike after the 2024 election to stuff happening in soccer, football, and baseball.
No, the poster you're replying to is 100% correct; after the Elon "nazi salute" incident, many/most of the sports subreddits banned links to X. Given the nature of sports subreddits, which are frequently just links to breaking news from journalists on social media, Bluesky is used as a mirror for X posts which are allowed to be linked in those subreddits. e.g. just pulling from the front page of your link, [0] and [1] are the same post. The Twitter one is the primary source (posted 25 minutes earlier, 10x the engagement).
I suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that itâs presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the âOpen Social Webâ.
You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.
My anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. Iâd say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isnât happening.
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024âs 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."
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.
At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.
Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others.
I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
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."
> As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out.
Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
I personally find it less toxic than Xitter and thatâs good. Less drama, lots of politics - which is probably normal at the moment but kind of annoying. Certain bubbles like gamedev are big. I think bsky is here to stay.
Whatâs unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I donât have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
I use Bluesky to keep up with software development news. The ability to default to my "following" feed is a big plus. I mostly see software related stuff and the stream of posts is slow enough that I reduced my time spent on the app.
Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol.
> Weâre launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]
I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
Looks like they are ready to scoop up a bunch of EU grant money, perhaps at fediverse's cost. Esp. since it looks (not sure) that an AI company is behind the initiative: https://themodalfoundation.org/
Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
>> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack â PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure â will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company."
Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.
Blacksky's AppView did get a mention in his 2025 predictions review[1], but perhaps it's not exactly considered "self-sustainable" yet? I haven't kept up with it in a while either so I'm also not sure on whether it is or isn't.
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
Consider a prompt like this to a Deep Research agent if you are interested:
How have youth career aspirations toward entertainment/fame-oriented careers changed over time (1960s-present), and does the rise of "influencer" represent a genuine shift or category substitution?
\"Specific sub-questions\":
1. What longitudinal or repeated cross-sectional surveys have asked children/teens about career aspirations with consistent methodology?
2. What were the historical rates for "actor/entertainer/movie star" type responses in surveys from 1970-2000?
3. How do current "influencer/YouTuber" rates compare when aggregated with traditional entertainment categories?
4. Are there international comparison studies showing different rates by country?
5. Is there evidence for changing perceived accessibility of fame careers (kids thinking it's actually achievable vs. fantasy)?
\"Priority sources\": Academic journals (Journal of Career Development, Journal of Vocational Behavior), Gallup historical archives, Pew Research, YouGov archives, OECD education reports, Harris polls historical data.
\"Methodological notes\": Flag when studies use different age ranges, different question framings (open-ended vs. multiple choice), and whether "entertainment" categories were offered or emerged organically.
I ran this for you and got some really interesting results[0] (TLDR: Young people have traded the stability of the "Company Man" for the autonomy of the "Personal Brand" in response to a labor market that no longer guarantees security.
We are a major sized user cohort and using social platforms is just not worth the energy is my feeping also. Granted not family tradeoff in ky case, just I don't have free time to waste.
can't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen.
It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)
Hasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though.
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
How does bluesky have no shareable content? My friends who twittered now all use BS. Havenât noticed a change in âcheck this outâ
Point to publically posted bs links or embeds please then. Not F2F shares. That's what I am talking about. X and FB have those in droves and they are a real growth driver.
Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances.
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
What would be driving that trend?
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
On that note there's also https://tangled.org built on atproto which (kind of?) solves that. You have one identity (the same one for all atproto apps) which you use to interact with any tangled repository (including those on self-hosted servers).
With its support for self-hosted CI runners it could also be a good alternative for people looking to move now that GitHub has decided to charge for those.
I really like this atproto model so much.
Having one account/sovereign Personal Data Store that can hold many different kinds of data. Then having many different clients and services that are decoupled from the data, offering all kinds of experiences is just night and day better than everything else. For everyone.
You account works everywhere & that's awesome. You also have credible edit & can take your account to a different server without disruption, baked in: amazing win for sovereign computing & digital rights far better than (basically) anything.
People can make cool connected online services, without having to figure out how to host all the data! That's so powerful, so cool (and ActivityPub maybe can decouple someday, but we don't see it yet. The data store and the app go hand in hand, & you end up with an account for each service). It makes it wildly easy to build incredible connected services with fantastically little effort and costs.
That said, I did try to get some of my work in Tangled.org just today, and alas found that the actual git data needs a "knit" server to do that. And afaik there are are no knot servers I can just use. I'd never seen that complexity for a atproto app before! Usually with something like the book reading social app bookhive.buzz or the annotation service seams.co , just having your regular account is all the data & service you need.
Social movements don't need to be quantifiably better to take off.
When the relevant audience is bored enough to be open to something new, it only takes a few influential people to tip the scales.
People don't want to be truly revolutionary; that takes actual risk. They want the appearance of being revolutionary with minimal downside and social reassurance.
(w/r/t GitHub there's already enough buzz in the right circles and it will likely happen this year.)
> I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them
The same is true in the other direction ("Ugh, this project is hosted on GitHub and I now need to set up an account"), with one major difference: compared to other sites which tend to just accept username + email + password for setup and username + password to log in, it's a huge PITA to set up a GitHub account in 2025 and to log in to an infrequently used account from a logged out state. GitHub won't let you get away with using it in such a simple way.
Social media compromises
- asymmetric social activity - standing in a crowd social activity - discovery - curated/accidental/mediated - directed presentation - advertising
Iâm not too sure what Blueskyâs approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as âeveryone is on Twitterâ
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change itâs nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just donât know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
Iâm not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the âinvite people you knowâ problem, and thatâs good enough for most of the world. The problem of âsomewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen inâ is solved with scientific publications, âcan I join inâ is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals weâre pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). Thatâs all pretty key for building applications.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
I predict 2026 will see a mass return to self-hosted blogging (and the Linux desktop, natch).
Why? AI crawlers will kill your server and give no backlinks.
At this point, I'm writing for myself and not for any particular audience, b/c even if I'm discovered, I'd be discovered by AI.
This is my hope as well, but fear of ai scrape is real among folks I have chatted with this about.
Fear of AI scrape? I'm just amused at the idea of my words ending up manipulating chatbots to rewrite stuff that I've written, force-feeding it in some distorted form to people silly enough to listen.
If you are putting something out for free for anyone to see and link and copy, why is LLM training on it a problem? Howâs that different from someone archiving it in their RSS reader or it being archived by any number of archive sites?
If you donât want to give it away openly, publish it as a book or an essay in a paid publication.
This is not an answer to your question, but one issue is that if you write about some niche sort of thing (as you do, on a self-hosted blog) that no one else is really writing about, the LLM will take it as a sole source on the topic and serve up its take almost word for word.
That's clearly plagiarism, but it's also interesting to me as there's really no way the user who's querying their fav. ai chatbot if the answer has truthiness.
I can see a few ways this could be abused.
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
What strategy will Nostr use to achieve true P2P social?
From what I see, WebRTC is the key to achieve direct P2P connections.
I'm involved at NOSTR project where beyond internet the connections can be made with bluetooth, LoRa, LAN (including Wi-Fi) and radio using walkie-talkies.
I still have yet to see a BlueSky link in the wild.
OTOH I feel a bit negative towards companies that stayed on X without at least also having either BlueSky or Mastodon
Staying on X is just bad, regardless of what else you do.
Because access to the internet is inequitably distributed throughout society, it is inherently problematic for any privileged class members (e.g. men, white people) to stay on the internet at all.
Check any sports subreddit. I also see them on Discord all the time.
https://old.reddit.com/domain/bsky.app/
Wow, it really is just sports it seems. I do not follow sports so maybe that explains my lack of seeing these links.
Big events in sports and politics are what drive growth for most social networks. You can almost map every growth spike after the 2024 election to stuff happening in soccer, football, and baseball.
Probably because of the pile on a few months ago about "no X links in my subreddit" because Musk is allegedly a Nazi.
Nope. It's been like this for much longer.
No, the poster you're replying to is 100% correct; after the Elon "nazi salute" incident, many/most of the sports subreddits banned links to X. Given the nature of sports subreddits, which are frequently just links to breaking news from journalists on social media, Bluesky is used as a mirror for X posts which are allowed to be linked in those subreddits. e.g. just pulling from the front page of your link, [0] and [1] are the same post. The Twitter one is the primary source (posted 25 minutes earlier, 10x the engagement).
[0] https://x.com/TomPelissero/status/2003827902388093289
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/tompelissero.bsky.social/post/3maqh...
I suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that itâs presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the âOpen Social Webâ.
You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.
Maybe Iâm seeing things the wrong way.
My anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. Iâd say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isnât happening.
Does anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her?
I loved her compilations.
https://www.mindset.ai/blogs/in-the-loop-ep19-mary-meeker-ai...
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024âs 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."
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.
At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.
Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others.
I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky.
Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation.
Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.
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."
The experience you describe has been completely different from mine. Iâm not a big poster, but I use Bluesky daily for:
- Sports
- Law
- Authors
- Comedy
- Video Games
- Programming news
- Other general news
Really feels like you are projecting a bit.
> As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out.
Maybe in your niche, but it's absolutely filled with lots of great people, and the posts are on topic and fun to read. Perhaps the issue isn't Bluesky, but you. There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
> There are still great posts there, but if you weren't reading that stuff to begin with, maybe this is a good thing that you aren't using it anymore.
There's something beautiful about a defense of a community that is also a perfect exemplar of that community. Bit fractal, init?
I personally find it less toxic than Xitter and thatâs good. Less drama, lots of politics - which is probably normal at the moment but kind of annoying. Certain bubbles like gamedev are big. I think bsky is here to stay.
Spot on observation. The very class of interaction indeed.
Whatâs unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I donât have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
I use Bluesky to keep up with software development news. The ability to default to my "following" feed is a big plus. I mostly see software related stuff and the stream of posts is slow enough that I reduced my time spent on the app.
Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
[0] https://www.eurosky.social
Thanks for the link. Seems like they want to be a European identity (and maybe more) provider for the AT protocol.
> Weâre launching @eurosky.social, a European identity that works across the entire open social web. Get access to any app built in the AT Protocol, including Bluesky, Flashes, Tangled, and many more. Hosted in Europe, governed in Europe. [Launching January 2026]
I applaud the effort, but participating in the Fediverse I take issue with the fact that they seem to equal AT with "the entire open web". That's just BS if true.
Looks like they are ready to scoop up a bunch of EU grant money, perhaps at fediverse's cost. Esp. since it looks (not sure) that an AI company is behind the initiative: https://themodalfoundation.org/
Steady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers.
Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
As others here below have noticed, there is no match between actual data and predictions made by the authors.
Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why?
Because people tend to predict the future they wish would happen, not what the data says would be most likely.
The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread.
>> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack â PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure â will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company."
Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.
Blacksky's AppView did get a mention in his 2025 predictions review[1], but perhaps it's not exactly considered "self-sustainable" yet? I haven't kept up with it in a while either so I'm also not sure on whether it is or isn't.
[1] https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-we... (at the very bottom)
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.One interesting difference is influencer is plausible for a significantly larger population of youth than their legacy equivalents ever were
This is probably true and I would be really interested to see a longer-running study with a consistent methodology taking this on
Consider a prompt like this to a Deep Research agent if you are interested:
How have youth career aspirations toward entertainment/fame-oriented careers changed over time (1960s-present), and does the rise of "influencer" represent a genuine shift or category substitution?
\"Specific sub-questions\":
1. What longitudinal or repeated cross-sectional surveys have asked children/teens about career aspirations with consistent methodology?
2. What were the historical rates for "actor/entertainer/movie star" type responses in surveys from 1970-2000?
3. How do current "influencer/YouTuber" rates compare when aggregated with traditional entertainment categories?
4. Are there international comparison studies showing different rates by country?
5. Is there evidence for changing perceived accessibility of fame careers (kids thinking it's actually achievable vs. fantasy)?
\"Priority sources\": Academic journals (Journal of Career Development, Journal of Vocational Behavior), Gallup historical archives, Pew Research, YouGov archives, OECD education reports, Harris polls historical data.
\"Methodological notes\": Flag when studies use different age ranges, different question framings (open-ended vs. multiple choice), and whether "entertainment" categories were offered or emerged organically.
I ran this for you and got some really interesting results[0] (TLDR: Young people have traded the stability of the "Company Man" for the autonomy of the "Personal Brand" in response to a labor market that no longer guarantees security.
[0]: https://gemini.google.com/share/3652b7910d8b
If you asked similar age groups this question in the 1990s youâd get stuff like rock star, actor/actress, and pro athlete.
Young kids usually have career aspirations that mirror whatâs popular in their media world. It means little.
Iâd argue those arenât really because of the social aspects of Youtube or TikTok.
Anecdataâas 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.
We are a major sized user cohort and using social platforms is just not worth the energy is my feeping also. Granted not family tradeoff in ky case, just I don't have free time to waste.
Why? At least currently I don't feel this way about them.
A "social network" is a concept that goes far beyond computing and the internet
I tend to agree â but is there any data on this?
can't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen.
Norman Cantani?
Bluesky? Fediverse? Really?
Sponsored by bluesky
I know the author, and do not believe that this is a true statement.
Nope not us!
please put more work into AI generated content
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