I looked around, but was unable to find more about this. Until something new comes up, I’m assuming it’s just a rumor.

Are you talking about Dorsey? Because if so, he left Bluesky as he didn’t like their focus on moderation.

Not that it matters much, I sincerely doubt most users look up such details before joining anything. It’s all about the experience.

Yet, Bluesky didn’t even support video posts until two weeks ago. Many other highly requested features are still missing. To what extent does the success of each platform come down to money? What did Bluesky do with a larger budget to get an edge?

That’s inaccurate and reductive. ATproto and ActivityPub do not federate the same way, and how they work greatly affects how users interact with the entire ecosystem.

On Mastodon, pick the wrong instance and there’s content you’ll never see, migration isn’t complete, discovery is so bad they started a new initiative to try fixing it, instances have their own cultures, and so on.

Bluesky has issues, some I’d consider critical, but they’re not directly user-facing for the most part. Make an account, you get the same experience as everyone else.

edit: Sorry, I have this issue where I try to be concise, yet feel like I end up being rude. I get your confusion, but they’re quite different. Hopefully this helped; I can elaborate if you want.

I think one of the biggest reasons is that the Fediverse is often a pain to get into and sometimes a pain to use.

Bluesky and Threads “just work.”

Some people say it’s marketing and in Threads’ case I can believe it, but I haven’t seen any example of large marketing campaign by Bluesky.

I didn’t want to rain on your parade, but:

• Firefox has hundreds of millions of users.
• Lemmy has less than half a million total users, and YTD MAU peaked at 52k.

Even putting aside technical details, I fail to see how “Lemmy integration in the browser” could be a good product strategy. A plugin/extension can also be developed by independent developers, which seems much more fitting for the size of the target demographic. Maybe I’m missing something.

Sorta. Only as a discussion starter, if you wanted. I was unsure how to frame my thoughts without being rude, but it seems I ended up being confusing instead. I’ll edit my comment to try again, please try to read it in its intended spirit.

Yes, I think that’s natural. A large segment of their market is still there. Throwing away years of work when the accounts cost relatively little to maintain would be wasteful. I don’t see how their presence there is relevant to this discussion.