where pleroma
where akkoma
where misskey
where firefish
where iceshrimp
where sharkey
where cherrypick
where catodon
where mitra
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 better.
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” 🤦
Mastadon is nice. I like Bluesky better. I think if they can eventually talk between the two, they will both win.
You can bridge the two now.
Bridging never really works.
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
installs both
Now… fight for my amusement.
It will be interesting to see which one wins out, like how Lemmy won out vs kbin/mbin, since kbin never accepted any outside help and stopped contributing. Not really putting the open in open-source that way, IMO.
I picked kbin for no particular reason and then moved to lemmy. Kbin was a dumpster fire of spam and downtime. Seems to be permanently broken as of the last 2 months minimum
Bluesky wins out.
Sorry, but there’s companies and interest groups at play here. No one is championing Mastodon but us fossy poors.
Would kinda be nice if I dunno… Harvard or, Brown maybe would take an interest in privacy focused social media and start lobbying for and spreading it.
We have companies spending billions on bullshit, with nobody spending a cent on truth.
This is the correct attitude.
Bridgy.fed is nice for bridging also for using both at the sametime. I think what a lot of people like on BlueSky is the feed algorithm without having to curate yourself like on Mastodon or posts sorted by the time it was posted. That probably makes a huge difference.
Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.
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
NGL I’m old enough now that I’d rather not see random tits in my feed.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is
Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)
The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)
The fact that the fediverse has been mentally limited to “Mastodon and Lemmy” is so sad. The features many people complained weren’t on Mastodon were right there on Akkoma, Misskey, Friendica, Hometown, and others. But nobody would even look at them.
Even on the fediverse nobody wants to discuss the sea of alternative services.
That’s definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha
And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn’t allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?
