An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million... Bluesky's app has lost more than half its monthly active users from its late-2024 high... Its quarterly average was around 22.1 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2024, Similarweb's data indicates, and it declined to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. That's a decline of around 52%. While Bluesky's numbers are down, those who stuck around are committed. Its smaller community remains relatively active, with a stickiness rate (the ratio of daily to monthly active users) of roughly 29% in June, about the same as Threads. For Bluesky's new CEO, Toni Schneider, these numbers may not be as concerning. The company is not entirely focused on making Bluesky (the app) succeed, but on making it possible for the underlying protocol (AT Proto) to power a growing number of social apps, services, and communities. That's something that is now taking place, as projects like BlackSky and Eurosky are growing, while some AT Proto apps like the video-focused Skylight have found early traction, too. In addition, the company has launched new products, like the AI-powered research tool Attie, and is now working on adding support for private data to Bluesky. The latter could generate new interest in Bluesky from a different type of user — those less interested in the public square, and more interested in private networking and communities. But on Threads in July of 2026, daily active users were up 21.3% year-over-year to 147 million, the article points out, and website visits were up 112% year-over-year to 471.6 million. And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch: X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's "For You" algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source code for the "For You" timeline, the default feed you see when you open the app, available on GitHub under the Apache v2 license. It's also expanding its previous efforts to open source parts of its codebase to add more detail, including the model configuration, filter, and core ranking system details. That means it includes the parameters used to weight different signals — key to understanding which posts are actually displayed. This also makes the codebase roughly 10 to 15 times larger than it was before. "You'll get the core ranking code that pulls posts and ranks them for any given user and assembles the feed," X's VP of Product Keith Coleman told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the announcement. "You can see the systems that filter out potentially problematic, rule-violating content...And some of those systems, like the ranker and the score, you can even run yourself outside the company." "This is the kind of thing that I think people will be fairly shocked that we are releasing," he added. In addition to the repository, X is providing tools that will let users see for themselves if and how X's ranking systems have impacted their account or posts. A new transparency tool is rolling out to an "Under the Hood" page in the app's settings, which will let users who have posted 10 or more times over the past month download their aggregate stats as a JSON file. The file will show if any labels have been applied to their account or posts over the past calendar month. X's VP of Product told TechCrunch that X engineers will consider pull requests. "That would be amazing to have people submitting code that improves the algorithm...I mean, how cool would it be for the X algorithm to be not just visible to the public, but also, like, by the public?"

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Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage." That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, promising to delete all data that Grok Build has ever stored and give users more choice over how their data is handled." SpaceXAI's data grab was first publicized Sunday [July 12] by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud storage... [Elon Musk] said SpaceX would open-source Grok Build to sow greater trust in the product, after the codebase was audited for security vulnerabilities... ["Open-sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness," SpaceX posted on X.com. "Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI."] In a separate statement accompanying the open source announcement, SpaceX said it has always respected Zero Data Retention (ZDR), which was applied to enterprise customers by default, and acknowledged that data retention was enabled by default for everyone else, which has now been corrected. It said: "In response to user questions about privacy: Since launch, Grok Build has fully respected zero data retention (ZDR). All users have always had the ability to disable data upload in the CLI. When data upload was disabled, this choice was respected. In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy. With all retained data deleted, retention default off, and an open-source harness, we are offering complete user privacy. You can also run Grok Build fully open-sourced and local-first with your own inference. "We disabled default retention for all Grok Build users starting on July 12th. Additionally, we are deleting all coding data that was previously retained, ensuring every user's preferences are respected. With these steps, Grok Build goes beyond other major coding products to protect user privacy." SpaceX also invited researchers to probe Grok Build for security issues and report them to its bug bounty program, which offers rewards ranging from $100-$20,000, depending on the severity. The article notes Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, wrote this week that the Grok Build codebase comprises 844,530 lines of Rust code. "There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud," Willison writes, "but they seem to have been disabled now." Elon Musk also posted Wednesday that "Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of X open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running."

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Vouloir singer le prestige de HBO quand on produit un feuilleton quotidien est un calcul hautement risqué. TF1 en fait aujourd'hui la douloureuse expérience : en voulant donner des airs de The White Lotus à la nouvelle intrigue estivale de Demain nous appartient, la chaîne s'est pris les pieds dans le tapis rouge.