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.
"Registered users" is a meaningless statistic. Daily active users has consistently declined.
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.
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
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.
Never said that, though, plus provided sources. Just adding context for what the total number of users means.
You still seem to be implying the number of real registered users on Bluesky isn't ~50M, which it is. The PLC identity spam you referenced is not being counted in this number.
If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but a source for that claim would be helpful.
I was rounding up, the actual number is ~45 million: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats (these stats are based on real activity, not PLC identities)
At current rate it will 50M in 6 months.
It is confusing to say "users" when it is actually "accounts", humans tend to associate "user" with another human, where as "account" can cover people and bots (many on atproto)
eg. I personally had more than a dozen accounts
That's a fair distinction to make but my (educated) guess is that something like 95% of users have a single account on Bluesky.
Most users signed up by downloading the app or visiting the web site and created a single account.
As a point of reference, the official Google Play store independently verifies that the Bluesky app has had 10M+ installs.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xyz.blueskyweb...
There are no official stats on the iOS app or web but those are both likely similar or larger sources of users.
I would counterpoint that a non-insignificant number of the accounts are spam/bots. Jaz's stats overestimate because it does not remove certain accounts which have been takedown/deleted, let alone those that remain. I have shared analysis of this on HN, Bluesky, and Discord to avoid making educated guesses.
The reality is that a significant chunk (>50%) was Blue MAGA, or turned off by them, and I see little prospect that they will reactivate. Outside of the Bluesky echo chamber, there is a deep brand association with Bluesky being primarily political refugees. They see Bluesky as the left-wing Truth Social. I've asked hundreds of people IRL if they have heard of Bluesky, they are far more likely to have this brand association than to have heard of "atproto" (more than half vs 1-2% / can count on one hand).
Sure, it may overestimate the exact count, but that doesn't change the fact that tens of millions of real people have downloaded Bluesky and signed up.
Right now, Bluesky has one large community, which is already great for some people but not most people. Once Bluesky adds Communities, new communities can form, making it interesting to the other 90% of people who were excited initially and then turned off by it being "one note".
I think your association with Blueksy is painting a rosier picture for yourself than reality portends. Do you know how many of those accounts never added a profile picture or even liked a single post? Do you think people are likely to reactivate to something they checked out once and has only shrunk since? Can ActivityPub/Mastodon add some new feature that will reactivate all the people who tried that out and moved on?
If you'd like to crawl the network to get real data, I built this a while ago https://github.com/verdverm/atmunge (it will take a few days to get sufficient data to do analysis, due to rate-limits)
Certainly Bluesky has stats about mobile app installs / usage. If they were good, they would be sharing those instead of the /users/accounts/ number that feels good but hides the reality. The first step (imo) would be to stop trying to deny reality and start asking why it is the reality. Only then can corrections be made. I don't think the core issues are technical, a missing feature, or a social media modality that was supposed to be built in the atmosphere. (other than my strongly held opinion that public-by-default was the wrong choice and bolting on permissioned spaces now is not a right answer)
I'm personally waiting on the next attempt that learns from AP/AT/Nostr, but makes privacy first core. I think it will be a few years still. Right now more people are shunning social media across the board, it's all so toxic and polarizing regardless of modality and where you use it.
I'm not claiming to know what reality portends, but I do think my guess is about as good as anyone's.
Bluesky did something ActivityPub/Mastodon never did, which is reach a mainstream audience of non-technical people. But its growth has been severely limited for one reason: the network is niche and uninteresting to most people.
Communities are a potential solution to this problem. If they work, it is plausible that tens of millions of users reactivate and, eventually, hundreds of millions of people join the network.
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.
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.