More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
It’s not a bad option if you don’t already own your own custom domain to use. Itch.io spelled out the instructions here, though you’ll need to have spent at least $10 on the platform to be able to do it. Pretty cool!
Lemon cited, among other things, the site’s new terms of service that require disputes to be brought in Texas courts, where a Tesla stock-owning judge recently recused himself from an advertiser lawsuit against X.
Lemon, who recently sued Elon Musk and X for canceling his talk show, pointed to his other accounts, like on the fast-growing Bluesky, where he posted for the first time today.
A live-updating tracker using Bluesky’s API puts the site at over 14,980,000 users right now.
The site has been growing fast lately, possibly spurred most recently by the US presidential election.
Seems like a lot of people are looking for a new place to post.
Though I should note that Threads apparently gets one million new sign-ups per day.
The Verge’s Bluesky account is now actively posting stories from the site, and there’s a starter pack for following individual reporters, editors, and others. Come find us!
The long-running instance hosts some of the fediverse’s great bots, like one that imagines the Google Searches of Star Trek: TNG’s Commander Riker. Another is posting 2001: A Space Odyssey, one frame at a time (which could take about five years).
Blaming ongoing expenses, botsin.space creator Colin Mitchell writes in a blog post that, starting not long after December 15th, it will go read-only until March 2025.
[muffinlabs.com]
Its $15 million funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital group that has invested in crypto firms, like Kraken, OpenSea, and Coinbase. Despite this, Bluesky says it’s not changing its stance on blockchains:
This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)
DomainInvesting spotted the Whois-listed change yesterday.
Last year, threads.com was just the website for a Slack-like app — you can imagine the traffic it got when Meta launched its Twitter alternative. Shopify bought Threads-the-company in June, though, perhaps clearing the way for Meta to scoop the domain for Threads-the-platform. And just in time for its Connect event, no less!
[DomainInvesting.com]
The company is ending its Mozilla.social Fediverse experiment in content moderation and will remove all content and accounts — but you still have time to move elsewhere:
At any point before Dec 17, 2024, you can migrate your account to another instance on Mastodon by following these instructions.
TechCrunch notes that Mozilla had about 270 active Mastodon users as of Tuesday. A tracker based on the Mastodon API reports about 8 million accounts and 1 million or so active users overall.
[support.mozilla.org]
After attracting 2 million users in its first year of operation, Bluesky has grown another 400 percent with some recent help from Brazil and Elon Musk. Are these monthly or daily users, or just account holders? Nobody knows! But it still has a way to go to match X’s estimated 250 million daily users and Threads’ 175 million monthly users.
In today’s issue of Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick argues that the lively Brazilian community of X users may find a home on Bluesky, but not so much on Threads, whose heavy-handed algorithmically sorted user interface doesn’t click with Brazilian internet culture.
A caveat from The Verge: we still don’t have official numbers on Brazilian sign-ups for Threads over the weekend.
[Garbage Day]