I’s heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because 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.
And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I’ve come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.
This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.
(To be clear, I’ve never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I’m asking specifically so that I don’t have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)
Edit:
Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that “federation” there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon’s federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don’t and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky’s overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
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.
The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.
No, they really don’t.
No I’m sorry this is not correct. Most people don’t know how email works. They don’t understand federation, how servers work, or have the confidence or patience to learn it. They want to click an app and get content.
You are on an open source self hosted federated media platform exclusively inhabited by tech super users and developers. We are very much in an echo chamber here. I leave you this study that I keep posting here when Lemmy users lament over the lack of uptake from the general public:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
I don’t think many people have read RFC 5322 (I haven’t), but most non-technical people I know understand these things about email:
I do lament the overall level of tech literacy.
Holy hell, 95% of people can’t figure out “what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability.” That is absolutely wild to me, and I already thought my perception was skewed the other direction due to working with largely disadvantaged people. That’s an eye opener for sure, thanks for sharing
Do they though? To most of my peers email=gmail
I do agree that it’s a good way to explain federation, anybody willing to be openminded will get the concept very quickly (I mean the importance of federation, like for email, not simply the fact that it’s a thing / old tech but whatever who cares).
But will many be exposed to those posts or articles explaining the fediverse while staying inside of the walled gardens? I hope so, personally I’m not going there anymore myself :)
I was going to reply with this. This is exactly one of the problems. I didn’t have a Twitter, but I wanted to join mastadon. I had to find a way to access it, and an instance to sign up on. In theory it’s good but for a new user it can be difficult to sign up.
Then ofc the difficulty of finding content, there is content, but part of the no frills meant most of the stuff I saw wasn’t in English (I am a mon-english speaker) and it was tricky to figure out how to juat get English content let alone content I was interested in.
I’m reasonably tech savvy. All my personal computers run Linux, I have a 2-node proxmox homelab with 10+ containers and virtual machines running self hosted services. I can hack other people’s code together from web searches to sometimes make things work.
I had to do a few web searches to figure out how to sign up and get started on Mastodon. If it was a bit of a challenge for me with my listed tech skills, it’s insurmountable to the average user in the general public.