Asklemmy

"Everyone is joining BlueSky so now i am too i guess lol"

I doubt anybody knows what Mastodon is.

Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn't give a fuck about federation, yet it's the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.

I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you're flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.

Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven't implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.

Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter's original founders.

Two things I don't see anybody saying:

1. BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn't won by having a better product, it's won by convincing people they should buy your product.
2. Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that's just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn't have like a 90% miss rate.

The absolutely delightful feature that you can use block lists, where you can block all of the MAGA trash with a click and effectively silence them from your life. The ability to collectively silence them is golden.

Probably easier for social graph exploration TBH, it's one of Mastodons main handicaps.

tried to register on first mastodon instance that popped up. couldn't because I have a Russian email. that summed up my experience.

I can't stand all the edgy fascists on mastodon

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were "Get an invite and make an account"

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said "Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn't really matter what provider you have". Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say "Just make an account on one of these four or five instances". And, like clockwork, someone would "well ackshually" me and insist that people can't use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn't need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.

I'm on both Mastodon and Bluesky. To me, Mastodon's biggest problem is its refusal to have an algorithm to surface popular content. Yes there are problems with algorithms, but I don't have the time or inclination to read every post in chronological order. A good algorithm would show me popular posts without manipulating me for profit.

Edt: a few people have misunderstood me. I'm not proposing "Mastodon shows me stuff from people I don't follow," I'm suggesting "Mastodon shows me stuff only from people I follow, but it shows me the popular stuff first."

People expecting a new Twitter when switching to Mastodon were met with weird behavior and nerds who told them the awful search function or weird comment count is working correctly because that's how federation works. Well if that's the case then federation is shit.

Because in Bluesky, you open the app, create an account, and you’re good to go.

Federation is way too complex of an idea for the average person. Picking a server and then understanding instances is much too complicated.

Yhea your first mistake is thinking that 99% give a flying fuck about federation

It just makes it's more complex to adopt

Bluesky ?

Go on there, sign-up, done

Everything works.

Nothing else to do. Nothing to understand.

.....BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it's just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.

Ask your average social media user what any of that means and you'll get blank stares.

Bluesky is way more approachable than Mastodon. Most people don't want to have to learn what an instance is.

Mastodon being federated is absolutely not a flaw. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place. The fact that people got used to using centralized platforms is an aberration and this needs to be actively fought against.

its about blueskys volume reaching a 'critical mass' which will continue to then draw users.

huge groups (recently, brazil) moved there en-masse because it already had a ton of users.

its the same reason twiiter even still has users.. they dont want to leave that volume of subscribers.

I agree with the other commenter's points, but one thing I think people forget to mention is that BlueSky feels like Twitter in a way Mastodon just doesn't. When I am trying to pitch Mastodon to people, I usually compare it to Tumblr because the vibes are similar.

Mastodon is also flat out hostile to influencers, and by that I mean the platform is designed to be terrible to influencers. The lack of an alogarithm means you can't game the system, no quote tweets means you get less opportunities to spread, no reply limiting means your notifications are going to be going nuts from the replies. The culture on Mastodon is difficult to game too, since people there expect thoughtful responses to their replies.

I think the problem is Mastodon makes it hard to find people to follow. I can’t even find mainstream media official accounts, let alone an actual celebrity. The discovery features need to be improved.

Meanwhile on BlueSky I instantly see every major news outlet in my main feed.

People don't care about federation. Or vendor lock-in.

I haven't tried bluesky, but mastodon seems a little broken by design. I'd you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies. Things like that make it seem immature and perhaps just a bad solution compared to a monolithic approach.

If you don't like the instance (why wouldn't I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It's not really a good solution. I would like to exist on mastodon and just use some server. If I don't like it, continue somewhere else.