Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.

Twitter usage surged significantly prior to the Musk buyout. In 2010 they had 40M. They crested 400M users by 2020.

That's the difference between growing your base and harvesting them.

Bluesky has in the neighborhood of 5-6M, by comparison.

Oh no, not the Vrchat of social media

Can confirm, my brother is a furry and on bluesky.

Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.

I don't have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.

Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.

It's hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in... It can snowball either way.

There's also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I'm not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split "some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app". I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.

As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don't want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.

I've been seeing more and more artists that I follow post on bluesky since misskey is basically closed for Japan now. So I would bet there.

Mastodon is more of a platform than a single service. Truth Social is, for instance, an insurance of Mastodon that hasn't been updated since 2022.

Or are they gonna all keep living in the shadow of Twitter

Practically speaking, the future is probably Threads/Facebook/IG. They seems to have encircled social media and strangled it.

But that's at a national/global scale. Outside of Lemmy style message boards, I don't really fuck with social media anymore.