"Social network Bluesky is gearing up for big changes with todayโs news that the company raised $100 million in Series B funding. The round, led by Bain Capital Crypto, was closed in April 2025 but had not been disclosed until now."
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/bluesky-announces-100m-series-b-after-ceo-transition/
"Bluesky has seen rapid growth from 13 million to, now, over 43 million global users"
Might be worth correcting this:
> active: 39,207,881
https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3mhg7zdpgsk2r
That is, the number of actual actively engaged users is far lower:
I've done a full scan through all PDSes seen on bsky.network (listHosts and then listRepos everywhere), and I got such numbers: active: 39,207,881 (= meaning: repo is visible) deactivated: 427,544 taken down: 2,564,669 total: 42,200,094 so around ~1M would probably have been deleted. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
@jorgecandeias That's our monthly, going by https://fedidb.com/stats.
Their monthly is 5.11M, so still quite a bit more.
But not impossible to catch up, given the trends!
@stefan Ah. OK. Apples and oranges.
I'm curious as to our dailies, but I don't think there are stats on that. I have a feeling most people here (those that post, that is) post every day, pretty much. Now idea how that compares to the situation in BS.
@jorgecandeias Yeah, definitely would love to compare this!
But, and you probably already know, at least Mastodon servers only report the numbers for last month and past 6 months.
And the reason this was only disclosed now?
"busy building!"
Baloney. Enough lies.
Still, 5 million* monthly active users on Bluesky vs 1 million* on here is really not an impossible gap to close, if we all put some effort into inviting our friends.
* https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
** https://fedidb.com/stats (this is likely undercounting due to the decentralized nature of the fediverse, plus I know some servers block FediDB)
@stefan heh. I didn't know there were instances that block fedidb (but now that I think about it I'm not surprised at all). My curiosity was about the instances they refuse to count - they list the behaviors that lead to blocking but not the instances themselves.
It's tricky. Most are kinda part of the fediverse because even when they're blocked by most decent instances they're seldom blocked by all. Which means the fediverse is likely significantly larger than reported.
@jorgecandeias Yeah, I can't remember if it was a Misskey server or GoToSocial. But you're right, definitely would expect at least some servers to block a tool like this.
Had an interesting exchange on Bluesky yesterday, someone suggesting that the fediverse had "16.5 million users a couple years ago".
๐คท
@stefan What?! ๐ฒ
What hat did they take that rabbit from?!
@mariusor I don't think we necessarily need to have more people. We all want different things from social media. Personally, I want to see more diversity.
But some people do make living off of social media, so those may care about being able to reach a larger audience.
Also, social media is kind of a zero sum game, so if you want to see commercial social media finally go away, you need to provide people a better alternative.
Higher gas prices, higher grocery prices, less health care, more chance of political abuse: arrests, imprisonment and/or deportation!!!!!!!!!
Stefan Bohacek
Jorge Candeias
Mastodon Migration
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marius
Craig Lambie
christa
allison
Albert Cardona
botvolution
DJM (freelance for hire)
katzenberger
jandi
Lawrence
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