How does the growth of Bluesky compare to Mastodon in 2022? What about Google Plus in 2011? I can't answer this globally, but (now that my comment archive is up to date) I can look at it for my immediate social network by looking at a proxy: how many of the replies people write to my posts are on each platform?

Here's the full time period:

I've included Facebook, Google Plus, LessWrong, and Mastodon because those are the four platforms where I've ever had an approach of crossposting all my posts. [1]

This is somewhat conflated by how much I've been posting, which has varied over this time:

You can see the impact of having small children (starting in March 2014, February 2016, and June 2021). The spikes in December 2019 and Fall 2022 look pretty random; just times when I happened to be writing nearly daily.

Here's comments per post:

With how unpopular and mocked Google Plus had become by its end it can be hard to remember how popular it was when it got started, at least in some communities. I started cross-posting to Google Plus in July 2011 (first crosspost), which is probably right after I joined and three weeks after it launched. Right from the start it matched Facebook, though it wasn't able to maintain its momentum. [2]

LessWrong, by contrast, doesn't represent the growth of a new platform: I was starting to crosspost to something that had been around for a decade, though with an intermediate period of stagnation. It's interesting that even though my writing is often pretty different what's typically on the platform my crossposts there still get 40% as many comments as my ones on Facebook.

Mastodon pretty clearly never took off, at least not in my communities: it follows a similar trajectory to Google Plus, but without much engagement even at the beginning.

I'll be curious to see what pattern Bluesky follows!

[1] For example I've cross-posted many things to the EA Forum, but because this is an intentional selection of posts it wouldn't be a fair comparison. I've also excluded the LW posts from before I began full crossposting, for the same reason.

[2] Sometimes people joke that G+ was a social network for Google employees, but that's not how it was initially: in the first six months I count 69 unique commenters, of which one worked for Google and two others (one being me) that later joined. Lots of non-programmers, mostly people I went to college with.