[TimorousBestie]

This is the reality of a platform that is hostile to corporations (even if it is hostile for good reasons). As far as I could tell, the company running Bluesky has limited ideas about monetization. In part, because they’re well aware their user base is hostile to X-style monetization (which, sure, probably made money, but at what cost?)

Hopefully some other ATProto implementor will come along with a better idea.

It is interesting to me that e.g. Adobe left Bluesky after relatively minor pushback, but they stay on X despite the much larger problems associated with that platform.

[palata]

But doesn't it mean that it's better for users? Why don't user go there? Do they like being abused by corporations?

Genuinely interested. I don't get why people would use X and not Bluesky.

[TimorousBestie]

I mostly interact with scholars on Bluesky, and my feeling is that the ones refusing to leave X don’t understand that a lot of the “engagement” (follows, views, likes) they see there is illusory (bots, spam accounts, misreporting of statistics, etc.)

“I had 10k followers on X but only 2k on Bluesky” is the kind of refrain I hear a lot. Even if they get more “organic” engagement in replies from human beings.

Also, there are no “private” accounts or “private” DMs on Bluesky. (That this only exists on X in name only does not phase them.)

[dragonwriter]

Social media has extremely high network externalities. People who are information consumers want to go where the people who are active posters are, and people who are active posters want to go where the audience is.

The actual qualities of the product are almost irrelevant if you have the current user base; it takes very a lot to get even a sizable minority of people to actively use social media that doesn't have that kind of established dominance in the face of social media that does, and it has to be sustained.

That's why most new successful social media sites (even though over time they may converge on feature sets) become successful by dominating some particular new media or interaction style not supported well on existing social media—it effectively lets them operate as if there was no dominant competitor, as an add-on rather than replacement for existing dominant social media. But Bluesky doesn't have that.