Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.
Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.
It’s not too hard to understand. Some people just like to pretend it’s complicated. It’s literally the same system email uses, and almost everyone has figured out how to use that. There’s no marketing for it though. It’s only word-of-mouth, and let’s be honest, us fediverse users often aren’t the best at communicating simply.
It’d be smart if some fediverse instances provided an email account with your account. Then we can just tell people to create an email account and they’d accidentally have a fediverse account.
I have yet to see any marketing for Bluesky. The fediverse still takes effort, even if it isn’t necessarily complicated.
I don’t recall feeling overly impressed with content on Mastodon, it’s just social media, but with a small userbase, I’m guessing more tech-saavy. I think what ultimately “wins” in the social media space is wherever “everybody” ends up going. Right now, Bluesky seems to have the momentum going for it as people are flocking to it in droves, but it’s hard to tell how sustainable it is long-term as the hype settles down. Right now everybody is excited and seems like they’re trying to make it a positive, creative, liberal space, but eventually trolls will start invading the space and it’ll be like every other social media site unless it’s somehow structured in a way as to avoid that.
“Leave that algorithm riddled platform and come to this new and shiny algorithm riddled platform” 🤦
The advertising industry used to call this an Advertorial, now it’s known as native marketing. All the same, it’s an ad disguised as news. You pay the journalist to make it look like there’s some crazy spike in traffic and the piper plays his pipe as the mice fall in line behind him to see what the hype is.
Mastodon is never going to be That Platform and that’s ok. It doesn’t need to be. The ActivityPub protocol is the highest value aspect of Masto, and there are a handful of other, larger, easier to use platforms that are adopting it.
Really? What other platforms?
There’s this weird one I’ve heard some crazy people use called Lemmy or something. I don’t know. They’re too niche for me to consider thinking about.
I’m not sure if people looking for something laid out like Twitter or other microblogging sites would necessarily move to Lemmy, which is more like a forum. The activities on any social media may be largely the same, but presentation matters a lot.
To me, Lemmy and other forum style SM is like going to a bar and finding people to have a conversation, where as Twitter/BlueSky/Mastodon/etc are like standing on a street corner and just yelling random thoughts.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean to imply it would. Just another activitypub platform.
rolls eyes
I thought the whole point of the fediverse was that it doesn’t matter which service you use, just as long as you’re in the pool.
The problem is partially that bluesky isn’t really the Fediverse. It doesn’t use the standard, and isn’t truly interoperable. Accounts can be bridged, but that’s a hacky workaround, not actual intercompatibility.
And threads is run by a company whose human rights violations would take a week just to read out loud.
The idea that the specific platform doesn’t matter isn’t a blanket statement, it’s a description of being interoperable, nothing more. Bluesky isn’t truly interoperable, and threads is run by Meta who facilitated ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the burning of whole villages in Myanmar despite countless explicit warnings that these things would happen if they didn’t take safety measures (not to mention all the other garbage Meta has done or enabled)
I do not see Twitter, Threads, or BlueSky as any part of the Fediverse since they are all for profit corporations. Fediverse is about being free of the corporate overlords.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
Threads is fully integrated. You can personally block them from your end, but thats all you.
It would be like saying “Dominos doesn’t make pizza. It has never been a pizza company”. With your logic being that you don’t like their pizza. Doesn’t make it true just because YOU don’t eat the pizza.
Bluesky I hear conflicting reports on. Some people say it is, because it can be, others say it’s not, because it’s not official. I get both sides on this.
But the last part…is objectively not true. It happrns to work that way FOR NOW. It just isn’t profitable enough for the major players to sink any real resources into.
The fact that it’s adfree has more to do with the fact that 60k people on all of Lemmy with most instances having a few hundred people “on” it, and also advertising companies not understanding the concept of federation.
I could start my own instance, and sell ads to corporate overlords. The biggest problem I’d face is the idea of trying to convince any company with money to spend that money on me putting an ad on for such a small audience.
If/when the fediverse ever gains momentum and becomes mainstream, you can guarentee that ads will be everywhere.
Because nobody owns the fediverse. Which means if I sell an ad on my instance, all federated instances will see the ad. Sure, you could defederate from my instance. But what would happen right now if lemmy.world sold ads? Is every instance going to defederate from the biggest instance, with the majority of communities? That would essentially break the fediverse.
We’re all on a service that you think is immune to centralization, but forgot the core concept that humans like to socially congragate. Which means it’s inevitable that there will always be one big dominant instance. Which means if this thing ever goes mainstream, the ads are coming, and they’ll be on all the big instances.
Well…I don’t know why you included Twitter on that list, as they’ve NEVER been part of the fediverse.
I included it because the article title included it, and I agreed it never would be. I then went farther and said I don’t consider any of those beside Mastodon to be Fediverse because they all are corporations creating platforms for shareholders, NOT users.
It would be like saying “Dominos doesn’t make pizza. It has never been a pizza company”. With your logic being that you don’t like their pizza. Doesn’t make it true just because YOU don’t eat the pizza.
To use your analogy, It’s actually more like they have the appearance of a pizza-like substance, but eating it you know it’s not pizza and never will be because it’s made of human waste.
Because nobody owns the fediverse. Which means if I sell an ad on my instance, all federated instances will see the ad. Sure, you could defederate from my instance. But what would happen right now if lemmy.world sold ads? Is every instance going to defederate from the biggest instance, with the majority of communities? That would essentially break the fediverse.
If it was pushing ads, absolutely! I believe the majority of us came to the fediverse to escape the ads/corporate enshitification, so the moment this stuff starts creeping in we can all just defederate them. Every admin knowing this would be the outcome I think also helps keep the fediverse “honest” as well.
Idea: The ads could be marked as such by the protocol or the instance would risk detestation. Then, every other instance could choose if they show ads or not.
Yeah but they’re fighting over the inevitable ad revenue.
Just some hours ago I read a post about how Bluesky will be the one to defeat Twitter… who should I believe?? ;_; XD
I promise you mastodon will never, ever be a true Twitter competitor.
You mean it has not what it takes as a platform?
it’s a combination of factors. The software is not super robust, the feature set is not what people demand, it doesn’t have the financial needed, nor the developer quantity, and people really want an algorithm despite what a lot of people in the fediverse say. The problem is you have to consider what drives people to platforms like Twitter or Instagram in the first place, and a lot of those ideals do not directly mesh with the core fundamentals of your average FOSS enthusiast. It’s part of why I have become a big fan of blue sky is they are sort of tackling all sides at once. it’s free and open source, it has algorithms, it’s federated, It’s financially backed, it has a pretty big dev team, It is written in modern web development languages that a lot of other web developers also use. They just overall thought about it well and are executing efficiently. I’m not sure there’s any other platform that you could really consider jumping to instead of mastodon if you care about free and open source and you want to be where the people are.
While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.
lol
Gives big “both sides are bad” energy
That cracked me up
That’s it, pack it up. We’re done here
Mastodon is better than Bluesky, but unfortunately everyone is flocking to Bluesky. You have to go where the people are
@[email protected] people still seem to be flocking more to Threads since it is growing by more than million users per day for the past three months. Have to accept there isn’t just a single place people are going.
That’s fine by me. It’s good to have choice.
Yeah, mastodon simply doesn’t have an advertising budget, and having to pick an instance, while trivial, is still enough to stop a lot of people from joining.
The name “Mastodon” sucks as much as “X”. I’ve never had a Twitter account nor do I want to open an account in any of the services, but Mastodon does not sound catchy to who they need to attract.
As someone who uses both. I think Mastodon also just doesn’t have the users, it is not as easy to setup and I think understanding instances and its UI are less user friendly.
Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.
It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.
There’s a lot of that. A ton of FOSS software is somewhat exclusionary because it’s made for the people who make it.
But a lot of the UX issues on Mastodon have nothing to do with the tech, nor the UI. They’re social in nature.The existing userbase skews technical, which affects what people discuss, and people looking for help are met with a deluge of tech savy people giving tech savy advice.
Oh, and there’s the mass of very vocal users on niche sites that have strong feelings about having their niche safe space invaded by “normies”, and who let it be known that new users should learn and adhere to “the rules” and respect the unlisted, unagreed upon nettiquite of social outcast “progressive” fedi or GTFO.
And then, on top of the social, there’s just the fact that most Internet users don’t really grok the Internet these days. Twitter or BlueSky aren’t websites to them/ they’re “apps”. The very nature of federation on the Fediverse runs counter to how they understand how thir “apps” work.
They don’t want to have to know about it, but they can’t avoid people talking about it, making judgements around it, and having to confront it when edge cases crop up or when admins decide they don’t like or trust the new crop of fedi websites that have sprung up this month or last.
On Twiiter or BlueSky, they don’t have to think about any of it.
ETA: Things might be different if people stopped treating “Mastodon” as a place that exists on the Internet, but even the Mastodon developer treats it that way, when it’s convenient to him. He’s created a little functional monopoly, and seems to care moee about that than anything.
Mastodon servers are Mastodon branded, and that is a mistake, in the long run. We need to communicate to people that they can sign up for MyInterest.social, that is MyInterest branded, while also getting to follow people elsewhere. That overcomes the biggest hurdle.
But that doesn’t satisfy the egos of people in positions to right the ship.
Yeah maybe posting it here doesn’t really help?
Nope. Every post I’ve seen about Bluesky has me confused for this exact reason. If it wasn’t for people talking about Lemmy in mass on another platform, I’d have no idea what the Fediverse is.
Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)
The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.
IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.
Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.
Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.
What do you like about bluesky more?
their discover feed and ability to create custom feeds
I cry a little bit every time someone acts like Misskey and its forks don’t exist
I never used misskey and it’s forks. How are their discover feeds and UI/UX?
It is odd when I see people compare Bluesky unfavourably with Mastodon when a lot of the features they want are on *key forks.
deleted by creator
You can bridge the two now.
Bridging never really works.
I haven’t tried it but I’ve seen various comments that suggest it works well. Time to do some research…
It’s weird to me how obsessed some people are with proving to the world that their social media platform of choice is superior. The Fediverse works, we have content, and anyone who decides to seek out a platform that offers what the Fediverse offers can join. Tell your friends about your experience if they might be interested but if they don’t stick with it you don’t have to be all salty about it.
Agreed. It’s silly.
I like Mastodon. It’s like social media from 2010, chronological, only seeing what you want, great curation tools, and no ads or stupid algorithm. Moderation is also way better on Mastodon, though it can vary by instance.
I haven’t used BlueSky, but I imagine it feels pretty familiar, which is what a lot of people want, and that’s cool too.
They can both be good things.
im gonna be real, this guy sounds like a loser. he talks about the progressive political lean and the porn as if they’re BAD things
Those are precisely why I like BlueSky. I don’t know if this was normal for twitter or what, but I learned you can search for a hashtag of your kinks (exp. #bigboobs) and you can see porn from people that have posted pics or posts about it. You can also hide other tags from ever showing up in the results, which lets you finetune what you’re looking for. I know the search works relatively the same as twitter with respect to hashtags, but was porn on twitter this whole time?
NGL I’m old enough now that I’d rather not see random tits in my feed.
I’ve been on Bluesky since February. I have yet to see any nudity that I didn’t actively seek out. It’s not too difficult.
Porn industry is certainly a bad thing though. It is quite hostile to women, and many have been harmed by it and wished they had a good exit.
Bit I definitely agree that progressive lean is a good thing. Fwiw I didn’t read this article.
I know women in porn who say the opposite.
When there in it, i’m sure there is going to be a bit of a bias.
Certainly some will say that, and even more would do if your environment is privileged (such as a safe neighborhood in the west or USA). You have to look at aggregate data, not anecdotes.
The modern porn industry is much more independent than it used to be. Most creators control and own their content and choose where it gets uploaded initially. In the past, the porn business was absolutely abusive to their stars but I think it’s much less the case these days. Filmmakers have to fight for actors because if they don’t treat them well or pay them their worth, they’ll just post their own content directly to their fans. I’m sure there are still huge negatives but I just don’t think it’s as bad as it once was and I certainly don’t think the porn industry is something to be upset about these days.
Bluesky is weird to me. I tried to use it for all of 15 minutes. One of the recommended feeds was called “Blacksky”, which is a feed specifically tailored for black users of Bluesky. I’m perfectly fine with that. I was, completely innocently, asking if there were other feeds based on race, similar to blacksky. I was threatened with a ban for racism. My question was very literally phrased “I see that blacksky exists, does the platform also have other race-specific feeds for users? Or only this one? It’s the only one that was recommended to me which seems strange for a new user.”
Being threatened with a ban goes way too far, but your question(s) as phrased does seem very much like sealioning even if that wasn’t the intention, so I can see why a moderator might think it was. Obviously, they should have clarified first.
There’s been a large-ish influx of maga users, looking for people to harass in the last week as the other normies have left Twitter too because they are sad and lonely people, so people’s ban fingers especially those with large accounts, are a bit heavy right now. So yeah, it probably completely came off wrong (like someone asking when white history month is) vs asking if there was a specific other ethnic starter pack that drew your interest. Sorry that was your experience.
