Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
Because none of those points matter to the average user.
At least for Japanese users, they want to see content they love from creators relevant to them. Creators = illustrator, comic artist, photographer, cosplayer, writer, etc.
Creators want a stable platform that allows them to widen their reach and potentially making more money.
Mastodon at the moment are tend to be hostile against creators that wants to monetize their work. Not to forget, the creator you want to follow are on defederated or blocks your instance for random admin drama.
But hey, at least fediverse software like Misskey actually trying to serve these community. Like allowing community ads (like promoting indie comics, vtuber, or social event) and trying to be stable by resolving any potential instance problem together with zero drama. Misskey community also often have tendency to “decoupling from Western tech supremacy”
I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.
At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)
I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.
In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.
I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.
IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.
The “just pick an instance!” and “my instance shut down” thing is a core pain point here.
BlueSky is corporately run, and it’s semi-centealized. This is bad for the internet, but it’s good for the user. At least on the surface. And that’s what users care about. It provides a sense of stability, and an umspoken promise that if anything happens, it’s the company’s fault, and the company’s problem.
The fediverse is run by hobbiests. You join some hobbiest’s forum or microblog, it connects to a bunch of other hobbiest’s forums or microblogs, and if things break, oh well, it’s just a hobby! And if that hobby becomes stressful for the hobbiest, they just abandon the hobby.
Leaving the users holding the bag.
The fediverse is unstable as an end user, because, as it’s currently structured, it’s not really designed to have end users. It’s designed to have hobbiest tinkerers. It’s right in the oft repeated motto of tne of the fediverse: users should own their data!
But who owns the data in the fediverse? Who actually controls it?
Server admins.
You own your data by self-hosting.
Like a giant computer nerd.
Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)
When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.
Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.
because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.
bsky also had a bunch of marginalised people - including trans people - as early adopters that helped shape their views on moderation.
because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.
The issue I have with this narrative is that the features migrators wanted already existed in the Fediverse, on Misskey, Friendica, Pleroma, Akkoma, etc. If anyone wanted to actually listen to those of us trying to point them to those options, things might have been a little different. But those voices were drowned out by the Mastodon circle jerk, and people didn’t actually grok the whole federation thing well enough to understand that they could follow the same people from any of the different softwareseseses.
The fediverse isn’t Mastodon, and we all do it a huge disservice by continuing to talk about it as if it were, even as we use a different fediverse platform.
Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.
I don’t know. But one potential advantage of bsky over mastodon is the data and real account migration capability between instances.
Also bsky is run by a company and overall infra is better than most community instances of mastodon, so people will see better performance and more ad/pr visibility of the platform.
I’m sure a certain percentage of people can’t spell mastodon.
I tried bluesky (bs?) for 5 minutes. Clicked one thing, saw the comment “Sunsets are my love language,” and realized that these are not my people.
Because most people don’t exactly want a community-led social platform that respects you and empowers user freedom, even if some say they do.
Bluesky is promising a Twitter-like experience. They promote their ties to the former Twitter, and promise algorithms, dopamine-inducing “reach” and “engagement”, paid subscriptions, some degree of centralized control (primarily of the network’s infrastructure), and a for-profit VC-funded company, all under the guise of federation. They claim a mastodon-like brand that they are yet to deliver.
Because most people don’t exactly want a community-led social platform that respects you and empowers user freedom, even if some say they do.
Get off your high horse. I work for a software company, regularly participate in beta testing and am very tech literate. Mastodon was agitating to use when I signed up and not intuitive. The community I signed up in also deleted my account during a “whoopsie”. A terrible experience drove me off with no desire to go back for such a tiny and relatively stagnate user base on an unstable platform. If that was my experience, the average person will absolutely not like Mastodon.
Your complaint is about an unknown instance admin committing a maintenance mistake. Will bluesky’s promised federation protect against that? You could join an instance managed by a well funded public entity if you want something that gets close to VC-funding. (which aren’t that reliable either. Look how many of these start-up platforms go away)
See this is part of the problem.
Dude was like “look at this objectively terrible experience I actually had”
And you are like “yeah well that could happen to bsky in theory too, so they’re just as bad!”I’ve been a mastodon user for almost 2 years, but I never use it because finding interesting people to subscribe to who are actually active is difficult.
I haven’t been using bsky because I’ve really been hoping mastodon takes off, but whenever I hear about how easy it is to onboard and find interesting content, I think about switching.I mean if a centralized social media is what you want just join threads and cut the chase. The complaint they made, bluesky’s federation does not solve. It is only not apparent because they have only one instance right now, similar to threads and Twitter.
What an absolutely braindead reply.
Mastodon had a bad experience for that person.
Blue sky didn’t.
Their experience wasn’t unique.
End of story.You’re doing mental gymnastics to misinterpret their argument. Nobody said they want centralized social media you absolute lemon. They want a user experience that doesn’t suck. Right now, blue sky provides that while mastodon doesn’t.
“Oh but bsky’s federation doesn’t solve Mastodon’s problem” they don’t have to solve Mastodon’s problem.
Elitist neckbeards like you are the reason the fediverse isn’t fun.
Your mental breakdown is reeking of self esteem issues. Go be a lunatic somewhere else and stop wasting my time.
I see you’ve employed the “I am rubber you are glue” tactic. Great job 👍
I never post, but I do follow a couple of channels on bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky always just works. Mastodon breaks all the freaking time.
What exactly breaks?
Idk the webpage doesn’t load, or i get some kind of weird error, or it seems to load but the persons profile shows they have no posts. Refreshing after a minute usually fixes it. But bluesky always loads faster in FF mobile and it seems much more reliable.
That has never happened to me. May I ask which instance you signed up on? I’m curious to try signing up there myself
Msdn.social, that’s where my account and the person who’s profile I look at are
msdn.social gives me ‘server not found’
Two words: Nomadic identity
First, Bluesky’s nomadic identity isn’t worth shit if nobody knows that there’s more than one instance.
Next, it has yet to be proven to work because nobody has daily-driven it yet.
Finally, if you want nomadic identity that’s actually proven to work, don’t join Bluesky. Join Hubzilla. Nomadic identity, established in 2012, some four years before Mastodon, daily-driven by probably hundreds or thousands of people since then.
I’m not even kidding. The Fediverse had nomadic identity four years before it had Mastodon.
To paraphrase my opinion from back then:
- Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
- customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
- better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
- stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
- many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods
Personally, I’m excited there’s a decentralized option that’s super popular. Yes, relatively very few run their own PDS, but if the main bsky instance becomes a problem for anyone, people can easily migrate.
It’s not just data ownership either; The AT protocol supports community-built algorithms, relays, and app views.
I wouldn’t say it’s truly decentralised in its current state.
The whole thing’s just a scam to off-load data storage costs to super-users. It’s sad that people are excited about it.
What is HOA?
Home Owners Association a group or people that “polices” neighbors and has a hisyory of doing shady things. But he’s referring to the actitude of “coming outta nowhere to tell you what to do” they have in common.
What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.
Yeah, turns out weird, hostile, anti-social nerds are weird, hostile, and anti-social, and they probably ruined our best shot at freeing the web from VC backed corporate control of communication.
Because it pretends to be different to the centralised corporate social media platforms, whilst giving the cohesive experience of a centralised platform
Best answer yet IMO. The cohesive experience is essential to the branding, and low threshold for entry.
You have to understand we are not normal users. Anyone even remotely interested in federated software are not normal users.
Bluesky may not have 57 third party apps and that’s why people are flocking to it. It’s easy. The signup process through the app involved no selecting of servers, no understanding of what it actually is under the hood, and users are greeted by a default algorithm that feels very much like old Twitter before Musk.
Basically, regular users do not care about the fediverse and just want a competent and polished app and site experience.
