I haven't said this because I own a quarter of this place so it would come off as sour grapes but yeah, bluesky isn't that much larger than cohost, and all of the additional perceived Mindshare they have is due to the fact that:
a) they intentionally recruited twitter influencers to be early users
b) they intentionally put everyone in much closer contact constantly
obviously bluesky has a billionaire and tech celebrity at the helm so they have the ability to do a) in a way we don't, but also these are things we would've intentionally chosen not to do even if we could
knowing that bluesky has like 2.5x more users than this place and posts just very visibly do way fucking worse on there is so funny
break yourself from the mentality of "i need to be where the people are" because you actually don't, you gotta be where people actively want to see your shit. what good is mad followers and mad views and mad algorithm if no one is taking your shit in and supporting you?
Part of it is people unwittingly internalizing VC logic where there's no meaningful concept of audience or intended market. It's why people chase virality when it demonstrably does not lead to sales connections (and this is all assuming you're selling anything at all, where any of this is meaningful!) Instead of actually developing an audience you're just trying to get in front of eyeballs, but no one who's actually successful does this! People who use virality to gain audience are usually springboarding off an existing audience they already developed. If you don't do that, if you're counting on "platform discoverability" and "virality", you're never going to build audience because you're not talking to anyone, all the huge number of users - ~0% of whom are your audience (thanks @TalenLee)! - is just a market diluted beyond any use or hope of connecting with anyone.
