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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

I've been around long enough to see X's trajectory. It's headed here (List of defunct social networking services, Wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

side note but Fowler's organization runs an employee Mastodon instance. This is the "correct" model that should have been applied to social networking from the beginning (interoperability, not silos)

https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler

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Mastodon can't scale and centralizes too much power into the largest home nodes, Bluesky is a much better, more 'correct' approach as you put it.

But ultimately it doesn't matter, I don't think your first point is correct - the window of opportunity for this cycle is behind us for a decentralization of social media imo. The network effects of X are too strong, eventually people will come back.

You're viewing the Mastodon vs. Bluesky problem from very different temporal points of observation, so your conclusions are not really meaningful. Mastodon is installed on hundreds of servers, how many instances of Bluesky are there? Until it's adopted more widely it can't be "more correct".

Did any of these ever have 300 million users?

without doing any further research I assume AOL Instant Messenger got pretty close.

Windows Live Messenger, on the list, had 330 million active monthly users

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Messenger

India TV claims Orkut was exactly that popular (300 m)

https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-orkut-farewell-m...

Orkut didn't really die a natural death, though. It was cannibalized to juice Google+, which subsequently collapsed.

"X" is definitely running right into a similar problem that Google+ faced: a good name can't save you but an awful name can sink you. I've never heard even the most ardent Musk fans defending the name change. It's ridiculous.

Google+ had 540 million active users

Active is very debatable there, I think Google counted anyone who was signed into Google.

Google+ had a lot of active users, which is especially observable if you join the right communities. The demise of Google+ marked the loss of those communities, which I still sorely miss to this day.

Those communities, plus stable infrastructure, great integration with photos, publicly viewable profiles without requiring sign-in, transparent moderation that I never knew I missed until I joined Diaspora, and no ads. It was a real shame.

They removed google chat and replaced it with Hangouts locked behind Google+. A majority of users might have been just using that.

"active"

Per Elon Musk, those are mostly bots.

Did Twitter?

Even Musk was trying to argue it was all bots before he got stuck with the bill.

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