It's sad that even hitting these meteics will reault in little actual growth. Bluesky is devoid of shareable content. Threads is.... just go to threads and use it and I bet you come away feeling like its unusable like I did. Fediverse when I browse it is like venturing into a ghost town. EVER time I see a blog with a linked acct I check it out. Always they are devoid of interactions. Wordpress blogs have real comments (sometimes) with real interactions happening at a decent clip. Thats the real state of things. Numbers go up predictions like this make no sense to me for one big fat reason, where are the interactions? (I want it to work just ftr)
Hasn't been my experience with Lemmy and some closer knit communities on Mastodon. My interests are niche, though.
IMO if you were used to the smaller communities of the pre-social media internet, fediverse stuff feels familiar. You aren't going to get 256k upvotes like you will on Reddit, but you can have some interesting conversations.
How does bluesky have no shareable content? My friends who twittered now all use BS. Haven’t noticed a change in “check this out”
Slightly tangentially, I expect GitHub to seriously lose lustre as developer de facto social network, with codeberg and self hosted forgejo taking off, leading to a fediverse of instances.
That is likely to be a bigger trend than any shift in normie open social web stuff.
What would be driving that trend?
I dropped X and adopted BlueSky & Mastodon, but must admit I find a bit annoying when projects don't use GitHub... I need to set up a new account to interact with them, if I star the repo my stars end up spread across multiple services.
I guess the ideal end goal would be if GitHub federated too and then some of that stuff would work.
The appeal of ditching X was obvious but I can't see the same for GitHub at the moment.
I really doubt that. People have been hating on GitHub for years or even decades. GitLab at some point very publicly wanted to become "the world's most trusted place for open source software" but I think they gave up, or at least pivoted to AI.
GitHub has one massive advantage which is even people in HR know programmers use it, and they can just glance at a candidate from GitHub. For as long as this remains in place, GitHub will survive.
I would rather use GitLab, honestly. Forgejo, Codeberg, etc, have a CI/CD modelled after GitHub actions which I really don't like, but I digress.
I think these are pretty good predictions, or at least line up with the goals we’re pursuing. I believe private data will land in atproto, hopefully by mid year. I also expect the tooling will improve a lot; the new Tap tool has made backfill and sync a lot easier, and the moderation tools are also going to improve a lot (the Osprey automod tool built with ROOST is great). That’s all pretty key for building applications.
Also quick prediction the Atmosphere conference in March should be a good time
Social media compromises
- asymmetric social activity
- standing in a crowd social activity
- discovery - curated/accidental/mediated
- directed presentation
- advertising
I’m not too sure what Bluesky’s approach is but all the different approaches to federation and replacing Twitter fail to be as simple and intuitive as adding your mate to a WhatsApp group, nor as simple as “everyone is on Twitter”
Twitter will tend to revert to its mean (imagine a pub where suddenly the MAGA convention from next door comes in and starts ordering drinks - the pub will change it’s nature but plenty of the tables will just carry on.
You just don’t know which ones, till you sit down and listen to the conversation- a lot like real life.
I’m not convinced that any technological change will make a difference - whatsapp already solves the “invite people you know” problem, and that’s good enough for most of the world. The problem of “somewhere in the world Paul Dirac is chatting with Einstein, can I listen in” is solved with scientific publications, “can I join in” is unsolvable and I think a misunderstanding of what was once happening on Twitter back when people cared
Something that the social media industry will try hard to stop: users placing an AI agent between themselves and their social media accounts. Smarter clients that front-end a large number of social media services may be the answer to the hassles of federation. If somebody works this right, Facebook/X/Instagram could be Left Behind.
The legacy social media providers face a quandary - prevent all embedding and hide from search, or be front-ended.
Beeper already does this where possible.
"the social media industry will try hard to stop" lmao.
I think you've misspelled "will actively encourage"
> Bluesky will cross 60 million registered users in 2026. Growth will slow from 2024’s explosive pace but remain steady, driven by continued X dissatisfaction and improved features.
That would be a surprise since (active user) growth has been negative over recent months.
As far as I can tell, bluesky is pretty much on the way out. Nobody really uses it like they did twitter. it doesn't have the same vibe. it just feels forced. the science community might save it as a kind of summarizing service.
i think this might be a problem with many of the "replacement" services. That initial growth and boom was driven by the novelty and curiosity of the service. Now that twitter is seen as kind of played out it feels unnecessary to be on a clone of it. The draw is gone and most of the utility(alerts) have moved elsewhere.
i tried using bluesky and it just felt...lame? It wasn't really bluesky, just the fact I was on yet another social media service. A significant amount of folks on there are only on there because it isn't twitter. then they realize they don't need twitter which means they dont need bluesky.
bluesky feels like a bunch of high school kids who didnt get invites to the real prom so they made a different prom, but the different prom kinda sucks. "Yay, prom!" "Um..this isn't prom, this is different prom."
What’s unfortunate to me is both Bluesky and X have become dominated by political posts. I don’t have any interest in that and just want to keep up with interesting tech updates.
Launching in early 2026, Eurosky Social [0] is coming.
> The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws.
> Eurosky is building a European alternative to Big Tech social media and web services that is focused on innovation, user choice and open standards. Eurosky develops foundational software and services that enable entrepreneurs and startups to launch their products faster, cheaper and ready to scale.
[0] https://www.eurosky.social
Yes, it's weird to be predicting the future when you can't predict the past. It's been negative over the entire year; the only growth it ever had was between Trump's election and inauguration: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
In recent months, however, I've been surprised to see that it has stabilized somewhat. There might just be this core group of people who are there for good. That would normally indicate staying power for me, except for the fact that they took VC and spent money on the thing, and they want growth. Normal people are repulsed by Bluesky. They're also repulsed by Twitter, but at least interesting stuff happens there.
Steady might be just fine if a higher majority of those users are writers and publishers and not just consumers.
I predict 2026 will see a mass return to self-hosted blogging (and the Linux desktop, natch).
This is my hope as well, but fear of ai scrape is real among folks I have chatted with this about.
Why? AI crawlers will kill your server and give no backlinks.
At this point, I'm writing for myself and not for any particular audience, b/c even if I'm discovered, I'd be discovered by AI.
The article is OK albeit unaware of what is happening on the NOSTR world so I'll take the liberty of making some predictions related to NOSTR:
1) Blossom grows even more and defacto replaces IPFS for decentralized file distribution
2) Open Social goes beyond text and decentralized video, docs, meetings, calendars become easily available with several implementations sharing a common NOSTR protocol underneath for accounts and communication, see https://iris.to/ as first example
3) True P2P social web is achieved. Forget about servers or clouds, each cellphone becomes its own data center and cellphones talk with other using P2P techniques
The sheer breadth of Nostr's current development is overwhelming at times. I often find myself exclaiming, "What? Nostr can be used like that?"
At present, Nostr appears to be merely a protocol operating within a social media framework. Its capabilities are vast, yet it fundamentally only requires "sending JSON via WebSocket and signing it using the specified algorithm."
What strategy will Nostr use to achieve true P2P social?
I still have yet to see a BlueSky link in the wild.
OTOH I feel a bit negative towards companies that stayed on X without at least also having either BlueSky or Mastodon
I suspect that Nostr is the protocol that provides people with the type of platform that people actually want when the wax technotic over the Web past and present. The issue is that it’s presented in a way that is apathetic with regard to the sociopolitical concerns of the people who are emotionally invested in the future of the ‘Open Social Web’.
You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.
Maybe I’m seeing things the wrong way.
> You would think that people would be in a rush to build with a technology that appears to be simple to implement and holds communities directly responsible for their conduct and content.
I think this is working pretty great on nostr. You have the WoT to fight cheap spam, spammers/scammers/impersonators get quickly reported and when they show up for you, you'll see who of your followers reported them for which reason. I can still see if I want to check myself. I'm in control, but I don't get bombarded with unfiltered spam. So far nostr has handled spam waves remarkably well. Problematic material (CP, etc) is scrubbed off of most relays/blossoms quickly.
Whenever I stumble upon opinions I heavily disagree with, I'm glad that nostr exists. I wasted way too much time in the self censorship safe space hellhole that is Mastodon where too many instance operators think themselves god of their own little pocket universe. If that's you're looking for, more power to you. It just wasn't for me.
>> "At least one fully independent ATProto stack — PDS, Relay, and AppView operating without dependency on Bluesky PBC infrastructure — will achieve viability in 2026, meaning it has paying customers or sustainable funding. This will be the year ATProto proves (or fails to prove) it can exist beyond Bluesky-the-company."
Isn't Blacksky already there? I haven't kept up, but I thought the last big banning blowup led to prioritizing finishing the AppView.
Blacksky's AppView did get a mention in his 2025 predictions review[1], but perhaps it's not exactly considered "self-sustainable" yet? I haven't kept up with it in a while either so I'm also not sure on whether it is or isn't.
[1] https://www.timothychambers.net/2025/12/20/my-open-social-we... (at the very bottom)
As others here below have noticed, there is no match between actual data and predictions made by the authors.
Which is definitely strange, and we should ask: why?
Because people tend to predict the future they wish would happen, not what the data says would be most likely.
The same thing happens with every HN predictions thread.
My anecdotal experience is that I still have to dive into X to follow some people. I use mostly Mastodon, occasionally look into BlueSky, and pretty much stopped caring about Threads since Meta decided to treat the EU differently. I’d say the grand social experiment the post portrays just isn’t happening.
Does anybody know what happened to the great "Mary Meeker" (?) Web Internet Report, posted annually by her?
I loved her compilations.
can't reveal too much too soon but someone out there is quietly trying to make "At least one major national government or major city will launch an official presence on BOTH Bluesky AND the ActivityPub Fediverse in 2026" happen.
Which language is this written in?
social web? naw, most normies are just hypnotized on the GPTs now
social network, and to some degree open internet, is a millennial thing, it will die out as millennials get older.
A poll of gen alpha (aged 12-15) from 2024 asked about job aspirations:
YouTuber (32%)
TikTok creator (21%)
Doctor/nurse (20%)
Mobile app/video game developer (19%)
Entrepreneur (17%)
Artist (16%)
Sports athlete (15%)
Professional online streamer (15%)
Musician (14%)
Teacher (14%)
Anecdata—as one of the oldest millennials, I have seen a very steep drop off in social network usage amongst my peers. Too much IRL family stuff.
A "social network" is a concept that goes far beyond computing and the internet
Why? At least currently I don't feel this way about them.
I tend to agree — but is there any data on this?
Bluesky? Fediverse? Really?
please put more work into AI generated content