Bluesky has a Mastodon-shaped opportunity
Mastodon and Bluesky feel like two different solutions to a similar problem. I didn’t post much on Twitter, but it was still my primary social network until I left in November 2022. While I prefer what Mastodon is doing, Bluesky’s discovery system does make it a bit easier to find people. I think their big announcement this week means a clear winner is inevitable.
A week ago, Bluesky opened up signups without needing invite codes. Yesterday, they sent out an announcement email, and mentioned that they grew by 1.3 million users, to a total of 4.5 million. At first glance, they look like they have some catching up to do with Mastodon, which boasts over 8.6 million users. But it isn’t the whole story: active users are what make the platform, and nowadays Mastodon has just over 1 million of them.
Bluesky added 1.3 times Mastodon’s active user count in six days, all of which might be considered active users this week. It will be interesting to see how many stick around. Mastodon’s user growth is mostly flat, with periodic jumps, like in October and July of last year.
“So what? Bluesky is a closed network,” I might hear you (rightfully) say. Bluesky’s federation features are apparently launching later this month, which is why I found the user announcement so interesting. If they can ship federation in a way that addresses the shortcomings of Mastodon’s version — like discoverability, spam, and abuse mitigation — it will have some immediate ramifications for both platforms.
If there’s federation, then there’s the possibility of creating a reliable bridge between the platforms. Mastodon has bird.makeup to bring tweets into users’ feeds, but it is one-way, and quite slow. I could see a bridge between Bluesky and Mastodon working in both directions. I’m sure someone smarter than me is even building it. Edit: Bridgy Fed is already working on this.
If that’s the case, Bluesky has a choice on their hands to make use of this growth avenue. They can either begin the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish cycle, or make a it clear they won’t go down that path. Assuming Twitter continues to bleed users at random intervals, let’s make open speculation on what an EEE cycle could look like.
Embrace. Bluesky realizes that combining networks means users can focus on whichever platform and not have to worry about splitting the audience, since a bridge would keep them connected. This also plays nicely with any future ActivityPub integrations, allowing Bluesky to access these ”toll-free.”
Extend. Bluesky builds out new features that benefit microblogging as the community invents them. Remember, this is how Twitter grew; they didn’t begin with at-mentions, retweets, or even hashtags. However, when building these new features, they should also create them on ActivityPub’s side. This is exactly how Google extended XMPP before leaving it dead in a ditch. If they go this route, it’ll be interesting to see if Mastodon folks see through the ruse.
Extinguish. At some point, Bluesky will create a feature that they can’t (or won’t) build with ActivityPub interoperability. If it coincides with a clear market victory, the cycle will be complete. Provided that there is a platform bridge, users’ data should be portable between Mastodon and Bluesky as well. I could see this happening in the next 12–18 months.
I can imagine some communities spinning up Bluesky servers counterparts as well, especially if their goals are to have a close knit community, and an ActivityPub bridge exists. Omg.lol does this today with IRC and Discord acting as two interfaces to the same group. You should totally join omg.lol by the way, here’s a referral link. Adam runs a great Mastodon server with it, too.
What do you think will happen? Do you use both platforms, and will you continue doing that? While 2022 and 2023 saw some abandonment of Twitter, I think many have gone back based on how quiet their Mastodon and Bluesky accounts have become. I am keen to see Twitter finally die, thus I am keen to see something take it’s place. I sure hope it’s an open platform, even though I remain skeptical that capitalism would even allow that.