[verdverm]

Probably doesn't matter for the "40M+ users", most of them have churned at this point and growth is negative. This is good critique for the next iteration of open social protocols, but fundamentally atproto did not fail because of technical reasons. The next iteration should make privacy the default and core to protocol, and be very mindful of how the leadership / social dynamics played out.

[singpolyma3]

Based on all the traffic and development activity I'm not sure on what basis one would say "failed"

[ftfish]

Source?

What I see here doesn't look good.

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

Never mind the pivot to reddit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit...

[adithyassekhar]

What’s the definition of success here? Instagram like user counts?

[bikelang]

Arguing that success is purely about the ultra high numbers seems to miss the forest for the trees. Is HN a failure because it did not reach the level of DAU as Reddit? The quality of discussion and community here is certainly substantially higher. I feel the same about Mastodon and Bsky vs Twitter. I’ll take community I actually want to engage with over sheer numbers any day.

[ftfish]

Bluesky has about 2-3 year runway, so, we'll see.

Source: Bluesky COO https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-su... (somewhere towards the end in the Q&A section).

[tptacek]

I think critics would settle for commercial viability, given the funding structure.

[verdverm]

They had a vision and goal to change social media, to get people away from Big Social. They haven't failed in the technical sense of closing, there are less than 1.5M daily (the stats trackers are starting to shut down), but they will also never fulfill on the promises. In the startup world, this is called a zombie company.

One way they failed hard is that they talked about how they were against the investors and VC incentives, then they took $100M from Bain Capital (PE) just after peak user count, but didn't tell us for almost a year. They could have put up a simple $5/month to support the cause, but they took investor money instead. This is why I left.

[pessimizer]

https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

[jacobgold]

Bluesky / AT is the most successful open social network in history and the only one to become culturally significant. It has been adopted by presidents, celebrities, journalists, and mainstream users.

Bluesky has ~50M registered users and has sustained ~5M monthly active users for long while. There's no reason to believe it will fall substantially below this level.

It is also in the process of adding (decentralized) subcommunities, which I expect to be really cool and have a large impact on growth.

[tptacek]

"Registered users" is a meaningless statistic. Daily active users has consistently declined.

[jacobgold]

I'd be the last person to downplay the fact that the Bluesky app has a serious retention problem. But it has "broken through" in an incredible way and DAUs/MAUs are quite stable.

Registered users is not at all meaningless. Bluesky has those user's email addresses, the mobile app is still installed on many of their devices, they have accounts, and they can potentially be reactivated.

For example, if Bluesky announced a feature exciting enough, like subcommunities, it could email those 50M users and possibly bootstrap a serious open network competitor to Reddit.

[ftfish]

A chunk of these registered users are apparently "ghost accounts" hosted on a PDS on a trump.com subdomain.

https://bsky.app/profile/tyggero.cz/post/3moskpisnuc2t

Source: https://sifa.id/stats

Statement from Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3mmp27wwnic2j

[jacobgold]

Based on your comments, it seems like you're trying to spread FUD?

The stats page you linked to explains exactly what's going on. These spam PLC identities have nothing to do with with the tens of millions of real Bluesky registered users.

Either you misunderstood or you're being intentionally dishonest.

[ftfish]

Never said that, though, plus provided sources. Just adding context for what the total number of users means.

[tptacek]

I don't believe the firm behind Bluesky can go to an investor and say "look at all these email addresses we have" and raise on that.

[jacobgold]

Of course investors care about registered users, for the same reason I explained. But yeah, they do care a lot more about retention and growth rate for good reason. Bluesky Social, PBC has raised $120M+ dollars from investors.