Something went wrong. Try again.
i asked claude this last night
Something went wrong. Try again.
1.9 kB · 15 lines · Created 2mo ago
123456789101112131415Mystery solved (⌐■_■) — it's a starter pack.
what's happening
@aka.dad (miguel) maintains an "AT Proto Essentials" starter pack, and plyr.fm is on its 99-account list. Last night (Aug 4, ~11pm UTC) he posted: "has it been enough time since the last time? YUP, repost, follow all, you know the drill!" — and people did exactly that.
The evidence is unambiguous: I pulled follow-record timestamps from the recent followers' own PDSes, and the newest ~10 all followed between 03:46–07:06 UTC this morning. When I looked inside one of their repos (jakobs99.bsky.social), they created a dozen follow records with the exact same millisecond timestamp (07:06:11.535Z) — the signature of the "follow all" button — including plyr.fm, pfrazee, and aka.dad himself, and they liked aka.dad's starter-pack post four seconds later.
There was also an earlier burst on July 1–2 (~12 follows in a few hours) with the same shape — his post literally says "since the last time", so he reposts this pack periodically, and each round sends you a wave of followers. That's your "random people": they're newcomers to atproto onboarding through his pack, not people who found the app organically — none of the ones I sampled have any fm.plyr.* records in their repos yet.
Beyond the bursts, there's a steady organic drip too: word-of-mouth is healthy — the EPTSS cover-song community hosted their "first atmospheric edition" on plyr.fm (Jul 30, shoutout from natespilman.at), people are sharing playlists, and folks like timheffley.xyz are recommending it to musicians in threads. 526 total posts mention plyr.fm, no single viral spike.
So: follower bursts = aka.dad's starter pack reposts; the app-curious users trickle in separately. Might be worth a friendly hello to miguel — he's effectively doing your marketing (￣▽￣)ノ
Sources: aka.dad's starter pack post, plyr.fm docs