Happy Friday, fediverse!
Looking at https://fedidb.com/stats, seems like things have been picking up around here again, nice!
Also, some interesting talks at today's Next Socials' PublicSpaces conference around communities, moderation, libraries and digital public spaces, and the sustainability of the open social web.
"Incentives are completely misaligned between users and platform providers.
[Mastodon] puts communities back in control."
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/live/7
https://conference.publicspaces.net/en/session/growth-and-sustainability-of-the-open-social-web
#fediverse #SocialMedia #NextSocials #PublicSpaces #OpenSocialWeb
Interesting insight from Bluesky's COO.
"$100 million is a 3-year runway."
Also, earlier in session she brought up the Reddit comparison mentioned in https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit-social-media.html.
"Bluesky’s Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told CNBC that the site saw its future not in rivalling X, but in taking inspiration from the online community forum Reddit."
@stefan that's a bit of a "pivot".
Surely the whole interface and layout etc would need reorganizing?
I guess removing the stupid 300 char posting limit would be a good start....
@chewie I think it's anyone's guess what this actually means, maybe even for people working there.
It might not be that they will change the interface all that much, rather introduce some new features to focus on discovery?
@stefan Interesting that they "only" have 600,000 daily users.
I thought it was bigger than that.
Does anyone have a daily value for the Fediverse? I see monthly stats of around 1.1m, but that's probably a lot higher than the daily equivalent.
I guess it's difficult to calculate every day for a distributed system :(
@chewie There's a few sites that report fediverse-wide stats, for example https://fedidb.com/stats or https://fediverse.observer/stats.
The challenge here is that specifically Mastodon servers, and probably others, only report monthly active users, and half-year actively users, eg here's your own server: https://mammut.gogreenit.net/nodeinfo/2.0
@stefan @chewie Uncertainties about fedistats also include the inherent difficulty of discovering all instances, most Misskey instances and possibly some forks not reporting stats about active users at all, the question of how to deal with widely defederated ones etc.
On the other hand the MAU you get from Bluesky stats sites also is counted differently from the Mastodon MAU since Mastodon includes logged in users simply accessing the instance while BSky counts only users that like/follow/post.
@evan They still have a fairly small team, so that probably helps a lot.
There were some interesting insights shared in https://ionosphere.tv/talks/QKNkKMX, if you've watched that.
"$800,000 a year to run the POPs ["point of presence, and it's basically like a co-location center"]
[PDSes] cost about $600 a month each [totalling at $792,000/year for 110 of them]"
So I guess I actually expected the runway to be a bit longer, but salaries is probably where most of the money's going.
@djsundog Yeah, I don't have a lot of hope for Bluesky the company.
But have you seen how much Blacksky, piggy-backing off their funding is getting done?
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116574703552426391
Blacksky's Rudy also said he "doesn't know how to pitch to VCs" and basically said that there are "no good VCs", so it sounds like he intends to keep Blacksky independent long-term.
@stefan if $100 million is only a 3 year runway in ones business model, one has a dogshit business model in a world where $100 million can become $1 billion with the ease of a single purchase (of a US senator or investment fund for instance).
Bluesky The Company is doomed. but "video parity with twitter" as The Big Clever Solution is comedy gold. blowing $100 million on website features trying to keep up with the richest narcissist on Earth's vanity project is not good business strategy.
@stefan the "become reddit" thing is fairly rich too.
reddit's 21 years to achieve profitability is a smidge longer than the 3 years of "runway" the bluesky CEO has acknowledged exist. it is not clear from whence they intend to pull the other 18.
@falcennial Yeah, this was another interesting insight, from April.
Basically they've been exploring revenue sharing as a way to make profit. Interesting.
https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116388629533109638
But in the article I shared earlier in this thread:
"Bluesky had not definitively ruled out ads"
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/04/bluesky-twitter-rival-reddit-social-media.html
Stefan Bohacek
Chewie
ikuturso 🇪🇺
Evan Prodromou
DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-lab
millennial fulcrum