Refutation[0] from head of Instagram
> There is no way this is the case as we have many times as many daily users as they have total signups. Maybe this data is web data?
The graph represents only web DAUs (no app) and only in US and UK, here is the original source with more context, including graph for global DAUs https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/b...
> web data
One would expect that these networks are still part of web.
Doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Threads has always seemed to be an afterthought for Meta. The only reason I even remember it exists is because every so often in the Instagram newsfeed there's "promoted" posts from Threads.
Would be nice to see some real effort by Threads. I think a lot of organizations (companies, non-profits, local government, etc.) would be happy to have a Twitter alternative that is as drama-free as Instagram.
> as drama-free as Instagram.
Have you been on Insta lately?
Whether it's for Bluesky or Threads, a lot of interesting people in Fintwit are leaving X and it definitely feels like it's about to reach the critical mass.
Not really surprising since on X, 99% of answers on finance related posts are crypto scam bots, but still quite a big change.
MAU/DAU have always somewhat seemed like dishonest metrics anyway, plus things like network effect and news cycles ("Threads has so many users!" yeah because it just came out). What if a company juices the metrics like say, not including messages in your email anymore, so you have to physically go to Facebook?
Zuckerberg's products seem a bit... derivative. They're all copied from other products in really dishonest ways
At least with Bluesky you can trivially download the entire firehose and determine the number of e.g. users liking at least one post. According to public stats [1] based on this data, ~2.8M unique users liked posts yesterday, which aligns very well with the daily active users shown on the graph.
The comparison might be wrong for other reasons, but Bluesky pumping their numbers is probably not one of them.
they are pumping the numbers. you can clock how many posts per second are happening in real time world wide on the firehose with the following (need "pv" command and websocat command):
./websocat4.x86_64-unknown-linux-musl wss://jetstream.atproto.tools/subscribe\?wantedCollections=app.bsky.feed.post |pv --line-mode --rate > /dev/null
I can prove the posts are DECLINING EVERY DAY, and now so can you.
this number never clocked over 160 posts per second.
its trending DOWN to 88-100 posts per second rather than going up, despite adding "20 million people" and "a million a day."
its not growing. its dying. pfraze and jay gruber are lying. as someone who was already there in the first place, and just got smacked down a month ago over rubbish , with ycombinator comments in my history to prove it , i can tell you that all the artists and things that made bluesky bluesky - including me - are gone smothered suffocated silenced and banned and now all you see are piping hot US political takes all day. im not even in the united states which is why i am livid about the new arrivals and the agenda.
so you have millions of "new accounts" that arent posting anything.
are these just bots to "like" jojo and the krassensteins TDS posting?
there are threads on places i shant mention, describing how new users are scrutinized to see if theyre anywhere politically to the right of Mao and hatebombing / harassing/moderating/banning them immediately. how is this even possible with a million new accounts a day?
I can't remember what company it was (and failed to turn it up on search), but someone (a streaming service, I think?) claimed, in a press release, how excited they were to have the highest number of users or downloads or account signups (or whatever) since launch. On the day after launch, if memory serves. Whatever the exact details, the circumstance was essentially, "we're pretending this is a meaningful metric," when it clearly wasn't because there was no history against which to compare.
Gotta juice those numbers and make the Street happy by any means necessary. The system is broken, but oh well.
I get your point, but just because its a spike doesn't mean that it's incorrect. DAU will slowly wash over, but consitent users will show a successful spike
Being derivative isn’t necessarily a bad business strategy as long as you improve on whatever you’re deriving from.
This is not a bad point, but I just think of the example of Instagram (which has now for a while presented a hard login wall if you want to scroll, well, anything). It was the photo app, and the quality of the photos have gone down as they fill the feed with more and more crap
I think Zuck just wants to own everyone else's stuff
> Zuckerberg's products seem a bit... derivative. They're all copied from other products in really dishonest ways
Was very successful for Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc and others. They do not care.
Each of them have made acquisitions to copy their competition.
Threads seems like it was designed by people who want me to be angry. Bluesky seems like it was designed by people who want me to be happy.
I notice I stay on threads longer, often thinking “people can’t possibly believe this nonsense,” and I notice that I’m angry after using it for some time. I stay on Bluesky for much shorter periods, and I often feel peaceful (even bordering on bored) after a session.
Threads default timeline is "suggested" and nearly all of the content is days old. There was a joke that we were going to be seeing threads about how Kamala crushing it in the polls and is going to win in a landslide days after Trump won, and that joke became a sad reality. Twitter was fun because it was nearly realtime.
The quality of the default timeline is also extremely poor. It's entirely engagement bait, most of which tends to be rage bait. Like all Meta properties, they've just taken facebook and presented it a different way. Instagram's feeds, when you haven't muted suggested content is the same, but pictures/reels instead of text.
I really wish Meta would stop trying to remake Facebook, but engagement sells ads, and they're in the business of selling ads.
Why didn't Threads work? Because Zuck is trying to do the bad boy act of Elon but all those who are interested in that are already on Twitter. He will always remain a nerd as long as is building a web app like Facebook. Elon at least has street cred of rockets.