I don't understand how Bluesky is going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.

It has apparent value propositions past the social network, but none of those use cases are visibly taking off and none of them appear to be monetizable. The social network itself is what will be evaluated when they go out for more funding. And I don't see how you can raise at all for a social network in 2026 with flat numbers, let alone the declining numbers Bluesky actually has.

I've been dual-wielding Twitter and Bluesky for about a year (after a year off Twitter where I was mostly Mastodon), and, anecdatally, we've hit a point where the engagement and volume of stuff I see in Bluesky is lower than what I was getting even on Mastodon. Earlier on, there was some truth to the idea that Twitter had a much larger audience, but you'd get better engagement on Bluesky. I now get better engagement on Twitter. I can see people I had followed into Bluesky moving back to Twitter.

I have no idea what's going to happen, but I'm curious to hear a coherent story about how Bluesky isn't cooked.

> I don't understand how Bluesky is going going to continue to exist past 2026, based on the sharply declining usage, their headcount, and the amount of funding they've taken.

Are you an insider? Where are the numbers?

how_long_can_bluesky_exists = f(usage, headcount, funding)

Three parameters and you supplied zero of them.

It does sound like you just randomly picked a number 2026 and proceeded to rant on how little engagement you received on Bluesky.

You can just Google these things. Nate Silver posted (grim looking) usage numbers --- followers and posters --- just a couple weeks ago. They very publicly raised a $15MM (priced) A round a year ago, after raising what I understood to be a comparable amount of seed funding. There was talk early this year of them raising again at a $700MM valuation, but I don't see a subsequent announcement that that happened.

You can generally take a headcount number and assign a fully loaded cost to it (say, $200k, conservatively) and just math it out. And of course that analysis assumes their infra expenditures round to zero.

So no, I'm not just making stuff up. I could be wrong! I feel like I was open about that.

Saying "you can google it" when the range of online information is massive is not a helpful thing to say. What numbers are you believing and why?

Nate Silver has basically zero juice on Bluesky, people go there to get away from that sort of "expert" that's got a huge profile already but is hard to escape if you are uninterested in his takes.

I mean he'll, take his own word on it, it's not the social network for him!

https://www.natesilver.net/p/what-is-blueskyism

What is Blueskyism?

And why is it so toxic for political persuasion?

Silver Bulletin
What does it matter how much "juice" he has on Bluesky? The numbers are the numbers.

His numbers may be bad because people on the website don't like him, not because of something inherent about bsky (other than better taste)

Plenty of big accounts have anecdotally said they have much better engagement on bsky than twitter

They're not his numbers. He's just pointing to them!