Bluesky sees record signups after Musk says he'll charge every Twitter/X user a fee to use the platform | Mashable.
Bluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only
Would you pay to use X, the platform formerly known as Twitter? Apparently, all of these new Bluesky users don't seem so keen to do so.
Bluesky, the "decentralized" X-alternative social media platform, just had its biggest influx of new users ever on Tuesday. This happened just one day after Elon Musk made headlines during a livestream with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he plans to charge all of X's users a "small monthly payment" to use the platform.
Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.
Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform's entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.
The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.
It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.
Bluesky is a direct alternative to the platform formerly known as Twitter. It's backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. (Although, we should note that Dorsey is not involved in the day-to-day running of Bluesky. The CEO of Bluesky is Jay Graber. Dorsey sits on the board of directors.)
In fact, before Musk acquired Twitter, the company now known as X, it even funded Bluesky. It provided $13 million in order to build a new "decentralized" version of the platform.
Furthermore, Bluesky's previous record-setting signup day was July 3, when 32,325 new users joined the platform. And that occurred amid the July 4th weekend in the U.S., when Musk abruptly made other unpopular changes to Twitter that restricted the content people could see without signing up, a move that alienated casual Twitter users, and benefitted those with paid subscriptions. Rather than paying, it appeared that tens of thousands of users preferred to just get their social media needs met elsewhere.
Mashable reached out to Bluesky for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
While Musk has previously mentioned his idea of charging all X users to post on the platform, those comments were made late last year, amid all of the other changes he ended up instituting shortly after he acquired it. Clearly, based on the reaction after his recent comments, some were hearing this for the very first time.
Whether or not Musk will go through with charging everyone for X is unclear. But for Bluesky, it is pretty clear that Musk simply floating these ideas is good for growth.
UPDATE: Sep. 20, 2023, 9:33 a.m. EDT This article was updated to include the final total number of accounts that signed up for Bluesky on September 19.
Topics Social Media Twitter Elon Musk
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Bluesky is the new Threads then, which itself was the new Mastodon. I can't keep up 😅
ReplyDeleteThere are many such completely irrelevant platforms like Blue Sky that have around a million registered users or less…
ReplyDeleteTwitter/X has gone from 229 million users when Elon Musk bought the platform to 540 million active users today.
If paying some small payment, like one dollar a month, would help eliminate bots completely from the platform, then I think most X users would think that is worth it.
Twitter was full of bots while it had 229M users, and if my recent surge of followers are any indication, most if not all of the 311M new users are bots as well. There’s nothing special about the platform, or its number of mostly fake accounts.
DeleteLmao are you just making up numbers? Twitter has never had 540 million active users. Ever. It currently has 238 million. That number is going down daily.
DeleteI’m not paying a dime to use a social media site. A few million other users are saying the same.
Deleteyou're conflating numbers. Twitter has 229 daily active users and 540 million MONTHLY active users. The numbers have not shifted dramatically since Musk took over. According to every traffic monitoring site, the traffic is trending down
DeleteFacebook is drowning in bots, bots on almost every post, but I barely see any bots on X anymore. X already made automated access to their API only available for payment and that eliminated like 90% of the bots on the platform. But sure, there are still some bots remaining... making X a paid-only service is likely to eliminate those remaining bots. And a dollar a month or so wouldn't scare too many users away.
DeleteThe number is directly from X/Twitter themselves. They published a chart recently, showing that the number of active users is now at 540 million.
DeleteWrong. And you’ve already been corrected twice. Typical weird Elon fan.
DeleteNo, I'm not conflating anything. Twitter had 229 million MONTHLY active users when Elon Musk took over, and has 540 million monthly active users now:
Deletehttps://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/musk-says-x-monthly-users-reach-new-high-2023-07-28/
you’re too stupid for your own good.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteYou clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Typical Elon Musk-hater who has been indoctrinated by the hate-campaign against the guy the last few months.
Deletehttps://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/musk-says-x-monthly-users-reach-new-high-2023-07-28/
stupid is as stupid does. You should learn how daily active users work.
DeleteEven if a few million users quit X, that's no big deal. X currently has 540 million users, up from 229 million when Elon Musk bought the platform. I suspect that the vast majority of the users won't mind having to pay a small payment(1 dollar?), to get rid of the bots from the platform.
DeleteOh, such a smart comment. I am blinded by your vast intelligence. 🤣
DeleteMaybe you want to teach Reuters about that? But I guess they are too "stupid"? Good thing that we have such enormously smart people like yourself around... 🤣
DeleteSlippery Elmo says many things very few are true though.
DeleteYou're comparing 229 million active users A DAY to 540 a month posting 200 million tweets a day.
DeleteAssuming active means posting, that's a fall of at least 15% of tweets per day.
You can't really compare the user numbers because ones a monthly figure with no measure of activity and the other is a daily figure. Over a month that could be 30x higher, although its probably more like 7x higher, if the average user posts once per week.
More importantly advertising revenue has fallen 60% which is the bottom line. More over, Twitter's reputation as the global town hall meeting has gone, it's celebrity stable has been decimated and the general sense of publish to stay relevant has gone. And so have its prospects of owning the conversation and being able to advertise to the whole world, and that's what funded its growth, and valuation.
It's just something awful now.
Yes, Facebook also has bots. And also like Twitter, I'm still here and using it. But I'm also not trying to defend Facebook by throwing around random user statistics, as if they matter at all.
DeleteNo one actually cares what a platform's user base is. The only thing that matters is if the people they want to talk to are on it. Bluesky could have 300 people on it, and if I wanted to talk to all 300 of those people regularly, it would probably be my favorite platform.
Anyway, I wouldn't bother using Facebook if I had to pay to do it either.
Not at all. But his plans are often extremely ambitious, and it's not always that he is able to achieve his plans in the timeline that he wants to... Full Self Driving for example has taken much longer to achieve than he had hoped, but he and his company are working very hard on getting it done, and are now very close to achieving that goal. The Tesla FSD is by far the most advanced self driving system in the world, it's now at 11.4.7 beta, and is expected to finally come out of beta in version 12... meaning that it will be capable of all normal driving without requiring input from a human driver.
DeleteOh, look, another f'n moron Musketeer.
Deletegood luck with that. Musk is a con-artist and a liar. FSD is years away IF and this is a BIG if, it’s possible at all.
DeleteSo if paying 1 dollar per month would give you a better platform, you would say "out of the question"?
DeleteOh, look, another f'n moron Musk-hater.
DeleteNope. Twitter had 229 million MONTHLY active users when Elon Musk took over, and has 540 million monthly active users now(see link to Reuters). And yes, thanks to the hate-campaign against X and Elon Musk from leftist radical organizations and media, advertising revenue has fallen considerably. BUT, at the same time, he has cut costs massively(rent, servers, etc.) and cut the number of employees from 7.500 to under 1.000. And the monetization of the verified status has brought in new income for X.
DeleteWhat many don't realize is that Twitter was losing BILLIONS of dollars in the years before Elon Musk took over, and in fact has only been profitable 2 out of the previous 12 years. Elon Musk is turning that around, and X is expected to break even this year, and become profitable next year.
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/musk-says-x-monthly-users-reach-new-high-2023-07-28/
It's working almost perfectly already. And version 12 is bringing MAJOR improvements in how it operates, by using AI in all parts of the system.
DeleteIt wouldn't give me a better platform. It would give me the same platform but it would cost $1. If *all* advertising were removed, I'd do it just for that. Personally, I couldn't care less about the existence of bots, they don't really bother me much.
Deleteworking almost perfectly?
Deletehttps://insideevs.com/news/671861/tesla-autopilot-736-crashes-17-deaths-nhtsa/
Removing all advertising would obviously be worth more than $1. But I would think most people would agree that paying $1 to make the platform bot-less, would be worth it and would give you a "better platform".
DeleteTime will tell, but I'm not really convinced that a $1 paywall will kill the bots. A lot of those networks have pretty big budgets. Especially those political misinformation bots, and the state-sponsored phishing bots.
Delete740+ crashes and 17+ fatalities. Mmm working perfectly. Yup.
DeleteMultiple lawsuits. Multiple safety recalls. Government investigations. Great job.
It was actually in profit if you aggregate the last 5 years, but that's not the point. The point is growth and influence, and I'm not sure where those alleged new active users came from, as most people I know have left it. I'm pretty sure they are made up entirely, either through sheer intervention or changing the way they are counted. You'll notice your link is referring to a an unsubstantiated claim by Musk himself.
DeleteX is awful. You can't even see a few of tweets from the people you follow as it shows all the tweets and retweets from paying users one user at a time, so you might have to scroll through a hundred reposts from one user until you get to the second, and then a hundred more before you get to the third, by which time you've got your limit for the day.
And there's no verified celebrities anymore, which was always Twitter's usp. And no amount of conspiracy theorists and trumpers will make up for that.
You can believe what you like.
If you believe that, you might be interested in a bridge I’m selling…a beautiful bridge that serves billions of travelers every hour.
DeleteA $1 paywall would get rid of the vast majority of bots. But yes, for those North Korean style state-sponsored bots and political misinformation bots(like the "Russian" bots that were paid for by the Democratic party), if they pay, it will be much easier to track it down, see who is behind it, and immediately close down whole operations(which could include hundreds or thousands of bots) at once. Of course there will still be attempts at getting bots on the platform, the point is to minimize it and make it not worth the trouble.
Deletethat’s a whole lot of stuff you just made up there. “Eliminated like 90% of the bots on the platform” 😂😂😂
DeleteBelieve what? You don't think most users would be willing to be 1 dollar per month?
Deletehttps://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/musk-says-x-monthly-users-reach-new-high-2023-07-28/
Yes, it's of course a constant battle, but Elon Musk and X have released updates about having removed 70% and then later 90% of bots on the platform. The introduction of payments for using the API for automatic processes eliminated the majority of bots on the platform... but of course there are still some left, and that number of course fluctuates, so even though they may have removed 90% of bots a couple of months ago, there could have been an increase since. Which is why I indicated that it(90%) is not a precise number.
DeleteAround 5 million Teslas on the roads. 740 crashes using the AUTOPILOT system. The Autopilot system is a much simpler system only for use on highways, FSD is much more advanced.
DeleteAnd of course you can be involved in a car crash without being the one that caused it, I suspect most of these crashes were due to other drivers making errors. And whether the autopilot system actually was engaged is also a relevant question, only Tesla have access to that data.
Tesla FSD and Autopilot are close to 90% less likely to end up in a car crash than Teslas driven by human drivers. Which is one of the reasons that the Tesla cars have the highest safety rating of any cars in the world.
And just for context, In 2021 there were 6,100,000 car crashes, and 42,939 deaths in the U.S....
Are they not still invite-only? What am I missing here?
ReplyDeleteAn invite I guess, just like me.
DeleteWe are the leftovers of the internet, left to roam on Facebook, forever rejects... stay strong brother 🙏😌
DeleteIt’ll be free to lurk, $0.99 per mo to post / dm, I’d imagine. You’d have millions of accounts leave but you’d also have millions of verified real people still left, keeping the network effect that is like a black hole, pulling everyone back in, especially if it really does solve the bot problem.
ReplyDelete🐷💍😊🌞 Stay positive.
Deletehttps://copenhagengf.vercel.app/
Yet I still don’t have an invite code. Mastodon it will be until then.
ReplyDeleteMashable selling another X alternative.
ReplyDeleteGood.
Deletebluesky, this name isn't as original as Twitter was.
ReplyDeleteStill better than 'x' though 😂
DeleteYes a fascist
ReplyDeleteand then there's the rest of us ... still hangin out on facebook
ReplyDeleteWhich is absolutely drowning in bots. Bots on almost every post.
Deletepeople say this, and i've seen bot posts that are obvious automations, but how do you know 'almost every post' is produced by bots?
DeleteYou misunderstood, I am not saying that almost every post is produced by bots, I am saying that on almost every open post(by real people with large following and pages, like Mashable, CNN, whatever) you'll find posts from bots in the comments, trying to recommend some cryptoscam or other such nonsense.
Deleteoh. yes , we do see a lot of that.
DeleteA fascist grifter just like traitor trumf
ReplyDeleteA fascist? I guess that’s why he has voted Democrat in every election until 2022… but it seems he is no longer a fascist.
Deleteyou know how he voted,seriously.
DeleteYes, he has been open about that.
DeleteI cant see Mashable here and I guess even harder to see on bluesky
ReplyDeleteSo they have now 10 users in total?
ReplyDeleteWhere them codes at?
ReplyDeleteRather than paying, users prefer to just get their social media needs met elsewhere... 42,000 new users have joined Bluesky, making Sep 19 the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform. Launched earlier this year, Bluesky has around 1,113,820 users in total.🤓
ReplyDeleteX難民潮開始了 ..
ReplyDeleteHuch ! 😂
ReplyDelete😢 will auch
Deleteich hab leider keinen Code mehr
Deleteone day after Elon Musk said he would start charging all users for X, Bluesky is seeing its biggest single-day in new user signups, interesting...
ReplyDeleteMe: (In Nelson’s voice) HA, ha
ReplyDeleteYou still need invite codes, though, correct?
DeleteYes. Do you want one?
DeleteWhat is Bluesky and why should I care?
ReplyDeleteIt’s supposed to be federated eventually, but currently it’s just one instance and very Twitter-like but with a different mix of people—lots of shitposting and horny on main stuff and mostly people well left of center. I like it. It’s also broadening, with more journalists, etc
DeleteAs intended. Silos. Divide et Impera.
ReplyDeleteYeah, but I’m encouraged seeing more journalists and scientists and humanities scholars join BlueSky. And I can’t help feeling schadenfreude watching Muskrat become more and more of a punchline
DeleteWouldn't a mandatory CAPTCHA for every single user let's say once every week or 2 weeks solve the "bot problem"?
ReplyDeleteIsn't there something that every user can be required to do even say every fortnight that can help with the bots?
Ahh here it is. You have a monetary interest in spreading disinformation about X and payments because you are invested in this crap. Nice try... despicable and dishonest? Yes. But nice try.
ReplyDeleteThink how many sign-ups they would get if you didn’t have to get an invite first.
ReplyDeleteIt's Pre-Insurrection and Pre-Elon Twitter... hard to tell them apart. Lots of interaction. Lots!
ReplyDeleteHe said he was getting rid of the block, too
ReplyDeleteI’m loving it
ReplyDeleteSomeday I’ll be able to join ._.
ReplyDeleteDon’t get this bc Jack Enabled the Saudi’s with info how to find users who posted in favor of Arab Spring.
ReplyDeleteAre those ppl alive?
So far one of the better alternatives.
ReplyDeleteWould like to join, but I don't have an invite code
DeleteYes that would be great thanks
DeleteChecking email for invite codes every day, but none yet! Hopefully one will turn up soon. Twitter not greta now 😕
DeleteYep, two invite codes available from me
DeleteYes please
DeleteMe too.
DeleteI still haven’t got a code, that’s the only issue. Tired of this cesspit here 🙄
DeleteSame here....
DeleteHave a few to spare. DM me if you want one
DeleteC'est vraiment un génie des affaires l'Etron Musclé...
ReplyDeleteSi quelqu'un a des invitations je suis preneur. Merci.
DeleteJe n'en ai pas encore, hélas...
DeleteNe sois pas pressé c’est vraiment pas ouf…
DeleteJ'y suis et je confirme : c'est le calme plat pour l'instant...
DeleteCe n’est pas le calme qui me dérange ;-) Bref Twitter reste Twitter
DeleteMusqué ? :)
DeleteAussi. Mais Etron Musclé ça lui va pas mal, je trouve.
DeleteIl n'est pas si musclé que ça.
DeleteIl l'est même assez peu.
Delete😅
DeleteIneed an invite
ReplyDeleteA billionaire fluffer somewhere: "Masterful move, sir! 12-dimensional chess at its finest!"🤪
ReplyDeleteStep 2: Musk buys Bluesky for eleventy billion dollars.
DeleteStep 3: Profit.
Banks are weird. If you want a 20K home-equity loan, they go over your finances with a microscope; if you want 40 billion to buy a never profitable url & your biz plan is "tRuSt Me, I'm A gEnIuS!" they shower you with cash.
DeleteThe day isn't even over yet Bluesky has already seen its biggest influx of new users in a single-day,
ReplyDeleteBluesky sees record signups day after Musk says X will go paid-only,
AMAZING