Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
Isn’t Bluesky much smaller than Mastodon?
At the moment, because it’s almost impossible to get in without knowing someone who’s already in. Currently, after about 10 months, Bluesky has about 2 million users (a sixth of the Fediverse). However, those 12 million Fediverse users have accumulated over seven years. Based on the statistics of fediverse.observer, the majority of those accounts seem to be inactive as well. Mastodon shows growth (about 100k per month) but other parts of the Fediverse are shrinking in activity.
Wikipedia has a graph of Bluesky’s user base growth:
At its current pace, it’ll take over a year and a half for BS to overtake the Fediverse (in total accounts, four or five months when looking at active users), but I expect those numbers jump up when the platform leaves beta. Wait list + current user base on Bluesky already exceeds the reported “active user” count on Fediverse Observer.
My personal anecdata: all the (semi) corporate entities I used to follow are over at Bluesky right now. Some, annoyingly, use it as their primary platform, while others cross post the same way people did when Mastodon gained mainstream attention. A few of the people/organisations I used to follow on Twitter are on Mastodon (almost exclusively people in the tech sector and a government service here or there) but I haven’t seen any growth whatsoever. Various experiments with Mastodon and other fediverse media also seem to have ended, with people leaving the Fediverse for various reasons (Alec from Technology Connections has done nice write-ups of why the Fediverse kind of sucks if you’re “internet famous” right now, and the reactions from Fediverse evangelists below show why that’s going to stay that way for a while).
I want Bluesky to either commit to federation, or for the Fediverse to take over, but neither seem to stand much of a chance against any corporation with VC money right now. Most of the internet doesn’t seem to be interested in federation and even here on Lemmy many people are confused by it (i.e. “I want to send this person a message but when I go to their profile it says I’m not logged in” because they went to the other user’s home instance instead of their own, an easy mistake to make).
The hope that BlueSky has is to find the happy path between providing the useful parts of federation without confusing its uninterested users with its complications.
I hope they succeed in this, as I think that should always have been the goal and showing how it could work can only be good for the broader mission.