Catching up with some of the news coming out of the Atmosphere conference.
"With Attie, anyone will be able to build their own custom feed just by typing in commands in natural language, the same as if they’re chatting with any other AI chatbot."
I'm guessing NFT profile pictures are next?
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/bluesky-leans-into-ai-with-attie-an-app-for-building-custom-feeds/
#news #technology #TechNews #atmosphere #ATProto #bluesky #AI #LLMs
So, Bluesky is getting more crypto VC money, more AI, and a full year of steadily declining activity.
https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth
While the fediverse is getting quotes, UX/UI improvements, starter packs.
Hm!
Though haven't we also been having declining active user counts?
Though if everyone's counts are declining maybe people are going outside?
(Just want to clarify the fediverse updates sound quite a bit better than the blue sky updates, I just wasn't sure about the trends in active users)
@alienghic It started to pick up again recently, might be going down a bit again, though.
Well. Nevertheless!
@alienghic Not sure if people have been going back to Twitter/X away from both Bluesky/fedi.
Can't really trust their numbers.
Maybe just giving up on social media?
I personally think it's more common for people to prefer more closed communities like discord
I think dealing with "the public" can be stressful and I think only some people want to do that.
I want fedi to grow but it's not a separate thing. It's an attention layer for the open web. growth here just increases the value of the commons, making it so the public decides what info, perspectives and art gets attention, not corporate algos. thus why the VCs have no interest in us.
@wjmaggos @BenjaminKlein Agreed. I personally care more about growing the diversity and making fediverse safer for people who are already here.
I'm fine with growth in terms of number of users, I guess, which that might lead to. But don't see it as the goal myself.
@vvv Yes, and that's a year since they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/bluesky-announces-100m-series-b-after-ceo-transition/
Doesn't seem like the money did much to help them.
@aaronmccollum Yes, the chart itself is nothing unusual.
To me, the interesting part is, a year ago they closed a $100 million funding round, which they just recently disclosed. And their numbers have been dropping the whole year.
Can you imagine what we could do with $100 million dollars?
@stefan With an influx of cash comes a curse. They'll want that money back and more in some form or fashion.
But I will sell out for pizza.
@botvolution Well they'll be pretty restricted, from what I've read, e.g. you'll only be able to add people to them who you follow, they'll be limited in size, you'll be notified when you get added, with an option to remove yourself, and you can opt out from being added altogether.
You'll probably be able to filter out posts that mention or link to them, I'd imagine. (Eg. filter out posts that contain a portion of the URL, if it includes something like "/collection/").
Seems like you can avoid this feature altogether as if it didn't exist at all.
@stefan
I remain deeply unconvinced of either their utility or any supposed safeguards.
I can't imagine the usual denizens of dotsocial carefully monitoring their notifs for this sort of activity.
We'll see, I suppose.
@botvolution Well I think many of the people who'd want to opt out already did, since this is going to be tied to the existing "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms" setting.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/
I think it's going to be much of a non-event when they're rolled out, like with quotes. Those have been out for a while, and I don't think they have become a problem?
@stefan
I think, in general, I have a more cynical and pessimistic world view! So I incline towards the negative, whereas you are rather the opposite I think!
It's hard for me to judge about newer features of Mastodon, because I'm on an instance that is many versions behind (in fact, currently an unsupported version).
My antipathy to starter packs & the whole "public lists" thing is rooted in seeing how it has played out at Bluesky. It is true, tbf, that the userbases are rather different.
@botvolution Ah, I might be missing some context. I have only started occasionally checking out Bluesky recently, to get a better sense of the site and its community, but I'm definitely not very "tapped into it".
But yes, I do tend to be optimistic about features being rolled out. Even the new redesign, Mastodon's team has received some pushback, and they're actually listening.
It's just nice that here the developers and server admins are only accountable to their communities.
We may not agree with all of their decisions, but I guess this is why I tend to trust the people here. I know they don't typically have a hidden agenda, and can be influenced to change their mind.
@stefan The funny thing about NFT avatars, BTW, is that Bluesky is making exactly the same mistake with DNS-based handles that Twitter made with NFT avatars: pay someone *else* for platform features, and the platform gets no cut.
(Bluesky does seems to have some kind of referral program with a DNS registrar, but it appears to be a very obscure feature that few know about.)
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