What does Bluesky have that Mastodon doesn't?
What does Bluesky have that Mastodon doesn't?
Is it just the momentum and word of mouth, or are there improved features as well?
172 comments
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Forgive my ramblings, but here's the main differences I see, from a community perspective:
Bluesky's for people who loved twitter circa 2015
Mastodon's for people who loved the format but hated the way the platform made use of it. The community is FOSS-focused and anti-corporate.
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate, but they still want their social media to be on a single platform and tend to dislike federation
Mastodon folks tend to be in smaller circles and more tech enthusedFeatures-wise, Mastodon kills the algorithm in favour of chronological timelines and lists, while Bluesky embraces algorithms, allowing people to even make their own algorithms for the platform. Bluesky's AT Proto uses "DIDs" to identify users, which are associated directly with a domain^[or subdomain]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub's @actor@my.domain.com.
Federation's still not enabled so I have no clue how things will look and feel on that front, nor am I familiar enough with the protocol to make any claim about how versatile it is. ActivityPub is flexible enough to be a Twitter clone, a reddit clone, a blogging platform, a youtube clone, a twitch clone, a goodreads clone, or several other formats. AT Proto's currently only proven to work for a Twitter clone.
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I would argue that most Bluesky users don't necessarily dislike federation, but rather have no idea what it is, or what the larger Fediverse is.
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Someone I'm in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.
He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.
It's not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn't that interested by what he saw so didn't stick with it - to each their own
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Bluesky folks are anti-corporate
Bluesky is a for profit company with a crypto person as the CEO and Jack Dorsey on the board so good luck to them I guess
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Oh ya, no, 100%. The company is still a for-profit corporation that needs to make ends meet come the 31st. The userbase is what I'm talking about there, and specifically their unprincipled stance wrt corporate control, in paying lip-service to hating corpos, yet wanting everything to be structured around a centralized entity and team who makes it easy to blame someone (1) for anything that goes wrong.
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It’s a public benefit
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You can just click Follow and start following someone. You don’t have to perform a copy-paste dance to bring the username back to your instance and do the following there.
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The process got easier in mastodon 4.2.0, now you just have to type in your instance and it takes you to it directly.
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Who wants to type anything?
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In the Mastodon app you can just click "follow". Since BS doesn't have a web interface at all, it's probably safe to assume that this is not a major reason a BS user would avoid Mastodon. Since they're not on desktop anyway.
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They always had a website, but it used to run off a staging subdomain
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When federation is live on the main node on bluesky there will still be some similar effects when you follow links from other servers, in that you'll need to bring that over to your own server somehow to follow and interact.
With Mastodon when you follow another's link you're asked to specify your own instance, in Bluesky you'll enter your domain based username and it will find your instance.
Also with the CDN like BGS caching servers being shared across instances you'll be able to find more content from your home instance so it will feel more like Twitter. You can directly search for users on other servers.
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An advertising budget
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It really comes down to this. So many time's I've discovered a cool FOSS project years after it's existed simply because I hadn't thought to search for it. Imagine if Linux had the advertising budget of Microsoft or Google. The "Year of the Linux Desktop" would have arrived in '99.
This aspect is one thing that makes me optimistic about the fediverse. A communication platform without ads and where the spread of information is dependent on network effects and word of mouth, means that it's much harder for a company to force themselves in front of everyone at once using dollars.
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A place where normies can feel at home, knowing that they won’t feel out of place not having a fursona or favourite Linux distribution and won’t be scolded for not using alt text or some inadvertent picoaggression. Also, the promise of clout.
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What? The constant wave of fury porn and Linux propoganda spam isn't what people join a social media platform for?!??!?
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Have you been on bluesky? There's lots of furries there
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Also what do you have against blind people
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Not a lot. Simpler signup flow and ecosystem, more twitter-like timeline and features, better discoverability and some communities that aren’t on Mastodon. FOSS diehards can mince about it all they want and blame idiot users, but the simple fact is people who don't live and breathe technology still have lots to offer a social network, and Mastodon continues to alienate them in design and in community. Lemmy does too.
I like Mastodon and Lemmy, a lot. I prefer them to the alternatives. But I just signed up for BlueSky and I’m enjoying it a lot even routed through the Mastodon bridge, simply because there are more diverse communities there, whereas my Mastodon feed is 90% tech and dev people despite spending hours and hours hunting for people I used to follow on Twitter. Getting big App.net flashbacks.
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I think a ton of what's wrong with lemmy and mastadon can be attributed to the bias of the user based. They skew very tech literate and liberal. Simple one click sign up and smooth onboarding into a user experience is the only way you will get the mass appeal of something like Twitter, reddit etc. I don't necessarily think that's a good thing honestly.... A person is smart, People are dumb.
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Like many cases of "success" lately. A well connected and rich parent.
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A megalomaniac owner
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Are you referring to Jack Dorsey? He's not the owner, he just gave them grant money in the beginning. It's a non-profit so technically no individual "owns" it.
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I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can't deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.
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See, that's exactly why I like Mastodon and want nothing to do with Bluesky. Sounds like we're both happy this way.
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Oh lord that would sell me on mastodon instantly if I weren't already there.
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Perhaps I should clarify: by "good posters", I don't mean Wendy's epically dunking on McDonald's and I don't mean "night water hits different" lowest common denominator posters, just ordinary people like you and me shooting the shit. I think it's sad Mastodon seems to have the reputation that people can't crack a joke there.
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OK this tells me that bluesky is definitely not for me. I am happy with Mastodon. So long as the people I follow (from technology, science, research, literature, owners of cats, dogs, etc etc) remain on Mastodon, I will remain happy.
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If you attempt to shitpost on Mastodon things don't usually go very well. The vibe had to match twitter circa 2013 or else it would never have felt safe enough for the first colonizing species of memes like alf hog to develop like the first plants in a lava field
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Easier sign up. On BlueSky you can just sign up for an account and go. You don't have to worry about picking an instance or anything like on Mastodon, which can be a bit off-putting for someone not familiar with federation.
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It’s ridiculous how much Mastodon advocates downplay this.
I strongly prefer Mastodon over the alternatives, but the onboarding experience is BAD for the average user.
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Onboarding to Mastodon is actually identical to BS/Threads now. They've made huge improvements. It's a shame that most of the news media's experience discovering Mastodon for the first time was in Oct '22 because it's left a bit of a "techie" aura around the whole thing they're still trying to shake off. If Mastodon was then where it is now, I don't even think BS or Threads would try to compete.
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For a while now, the app has been really easy to sign up on, and now the website is the same.
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Isn't BlueSky still on an invite system?
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FYI- Signing up and following people on the Mastodon app now is literally just as easy as it is on BS. All the Federation stuff is hidden unless you want to look for it. It's very nice.
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I've been on the waiting list for months now, at least there are Mastodon instances with open registration available.
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Want an invite?
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- No HOA complaining that you didn’t CW a picture with eye contact or food or alcohol or matter
- More witty people from X
- No drama about who is defederating with who
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Which instance have you been on?
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My instance is great, although I wish we would switch to glitch-soc so we could have instance-only visibility on posts. I don’t really see much inter-instance drama and I generally don’t get harassed by people who think I need to post a certain way (maybe because I’ve been on Masto since 2018 and they have been on less than a year?)
But those are still legitimate problems for a lot of people.
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Look, on Mastodon you have to pick a server. That's just too hard to do.
That's why email never took off.
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unironically this.
You think 'oh it's not that hard to just pick a sever', but it is. Most people look at it and go 'well my favorite influencer or friend is on X, but I can only make an account on Y. Can I still communicate with them?! Which advantage has sever Y over server Z? etc. It's it's ONE barrier which is one barrier too much for many people (on top of all the new things they have to learn anyway when they decide to get on a new social network)
Most people don't know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do - and it's scary to them to be confronted with a question about system architecture, when all they want to do is read news or memes.
And it's interesting that you mention email, because I'd argue email has the exact same problem. Depending on which country you live in, you'll notice that most people use primarily one email provider per region/country. Why? because their friends use the same email provider. You know how many people told me "well, I don't have email, but I can give you my Gmail if you want...?" Email just 'took off' because it had nothing to compete with for 20 years and businesses depended on it as well.
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Most people don't know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do
I don't think you at all need to understand federation other than it means you can join from multiple places and that typically they mostly all talk so just pick a medium to popular one.
I still don't really understand exactly how federation works and I don't think it hinders me at all to not understand it.
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Sarcasm aside, you're not wrong. The top result for "Lemmy" (that isn't about Motörhead) is for Join-Lemmy.org. I'm a tech-minded person, but when I saw this "join a server" crap instead of a front page, I decided that I'm too old and that it's too much effort to figure out. Now imagine someone who isn't tech-minded wants to join. They'll fuck off even sooner than I did.
Hell, the only reason why I'm here is because I decided that Imgur isn't a good alternative. They're no better than reddit (i.e. no 3rd party apps). So I decided to stop being lazy and figure it the fuck out. Others might not be as motivated.
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It's ironic because bluesky is also going to have multiple servers sometime soon
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... meanwhile, every account system: please enter your email
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he forgot to put : /s
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Bluesky is to Mastodon & ActivityPub, what Matrix is to XMPP/IRC... a completely over-engineered system, ignoring all well established international standards and run by a for-profit entity with venture capital funding.
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that actually explains why i find matrix so annoying, thanks.
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And when the venture capital runs out, they will need to turn a profit. And the cycle of enshittification will continue.
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Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have. I don't think you understand how the Matrix protocol at works, and I assume you are blindly repeating what you read online that XMPP must be better because it supposedly has less lines of code, though I'm sure you didn't check that either.
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Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.
On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.
On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are "built" around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.
The AT protocol also has "real" account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account "portability" is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.
Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn't: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn't federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.
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My money's on BS never federating at all. Mastodon Instances are communities unto themselves. The way BS is set up means an "instance" is essentially just free additional hosting for BlueSky Inc. It's decentralized similarly to how crypto is decentralized. Of course, what else would one expect from Jack.
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There's a sandbox with federation with third party clients already live. Every piece of the system can be federated or substituted.
If somebody wanted to fork out and federate in open now they could. They aren't doing so because it's still work in progress, especially moderation tooling and scaling needs improvements
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Users.
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☠️
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Tho I agree with all the comments I have to say the general vibe of bluesky is more playful and fun compared to mastadon, perhaps its just my bias. But just like lemmy generally feels like a nice place to be so does bluesky- the vibe feels inviting.
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I've got an account on Bluesky and I'm not sure if I agree. Like 90% of the posts I've seen on there are about Bluesky itself, there wasn't really anything beyond that.
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A cult leader in Jack Dorsey
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Jack literally deleted his bluesky account and ran off to nostr
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A noted cryptobro ran off to join the other cryptobros on Cryptobro Central.
What. A. Surprise.
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I hate gatekeeping so much, but what I'm about to say is going to contradict that statement so much I should probably stop typing and start this post again....
Anywhoo....
If a troglodyte can't figure out how to sign up for the fediverse, then they should stick to CorpoChat
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I never got the argument that it's hard to sign up to. I think the main issues are that people want content from media entities that may not be present or welcome - legacy media etc. This could be where threads.net fills the gap but then it sounds like they will be blocked from a lot of instances.
I have worked around it via press.coop but they don't cover everything. I also follow more journalists directly than I did on Twitter. I don't miss Twitter and find Mastodon more informative but I'm sure that's because of the information I'm looking for.
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When I first made an account I did it on Lemmy.ml because that's what I had heard some people talking about and didn't know it was one several Lemmy instances. I wasn't aware that ml stood for marxist-leninist, and switched over to the the other I knew about .world.
I can see the average joe joining the wrong place and seeing an echo chamber or an essential empty isolated instance then forming their opinions on the fediverse around that.
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i agree.......but....no
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An artificial scarcity model which gets people excited over the chance to join diet twitter.
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Hype & mainstream celebrities?
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People just join it thinking it's Jack Dorsey's next twitter.
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An invite-only strategy straight out of the early 2000s
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dril
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If you go on Bluesky they will tell you. Lots of people saying that they feel isolated because there is no algorithm feeding engagement, and federation doesn't lend itself to finding your friends from Twitter easily without one of those migration tools people were using. Then another chunk describe Mastodon users as a "HOA" because someone told them to put a CW on something.
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I think emulating twitter was a huge mistake for mastadon, the twitter reply structure that makes it difficult to have a long conversation with multiple people to be the main part of the post but ideal for "dunks" and outrage farming. I think the Tumblr reblog structure would have been an infinitly better choice for the more actual socialising thing fediverse is going for and a small user base that isnt producing much content and can re-circulate older posts. also it's less image-centric allowing more posts to be stored on a server, additionally (intuitively, I haven't thought about implementation that hard) it seems like a much more natural fit for federation.
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It creates that "one big chatroom" vibe from old twitter, while Mastodon feels like a bunch of people microblogging next to each other
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I do agree with you, but it's funny because on the description for the app, it says BlueSky is for microblogging.
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Yeah all of these are in theory in this "microblogging" genre of apps.
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Portable accounts and being able to add third party layers to your feed for moderation and sorting algorithms. At least that's their design goal, idk if it's actually implemented because I never got an invite after like half a year.
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Yep. I love and use lists on Mastodon, but I'd love to have the custom algos as well.
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3rd party feeds are live. Portability is technically live but federation isn't live outside the sandbox so you can't make use of it yet (as in once federation is on the existing protocol will immediately allow you to migrate your profile)
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As much as people may not like to hear it Ease of use from being one centralized platform is a big factor
Just login and be done with it
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Lots of semi naked dudes and I still don't know why!
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welp. guess im quitting mastodon then
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Not sure who was giving me the down vote, but I honestly would love to like bluesky more, but I get to much of those on discovery and what's hot classic.. I don't mind the cats...
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It's called the gay community
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Main positive thing I’ve heard is that it has a different vibe and culture that some might find more open and fun and sometimes even less problematic. That’s just hearsay, I’m not on there, but I’ve heard it from people I like and trust (on masto).
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Yeah it’s basically old twitter before all the political drama and bots. The discover tab isn’t full of rage bait. I expect if you stop needing an invite to get in it’ll go down hill quickly.
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Invites are really common on other sites now that a critical mass has been reached where people have invited everyone they know who is interested already and are like selling them, there are already accounts that farm engagement on there like "funny cat pics of the day" or something and it will indeed have some cat pics taken from wherever but the point of the account is to follow thousands of accounts to get followed back, and thereby build a following to sell off. It's an extremely clumsy strategy but it's being pursued often enough that you can't just assume a bluesky account isn't a bad actor. So if that is the threshold then it's already been reached.
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More non political stuff most likely.
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Most of the people I followed on Twitter. Unfortunately.
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People are happy to peddle incorrect information which is easy to find. Dorsey is on the board, but deleted his account and used Nostr and Twitter significantly more than he ever did bluesky. Cultural debt: Mastodon has the cultural debt of reply guys, FOSS bros, racism etc During the great migration a lot of minorities attempted the switch and were met with a lot of racism which was easy to hide due to PM. Mastodon also has the onboarding issues. Studies show most users are passive users of social media, they don’t want much friction just to lurk. Bluesky appealed to minorities particularly Black women very early in the process and that contributed to the growth and culture. They’ve lost some of the goodwill due to some moderation issues. But, without the cultural debt and without making decisions such as no full-text search (since changed) and no QTs, two features that benefits minorities and professionals alike turned off many. There’s also no current federation so the onboarding is simple and smooth. The culture on Mastodon based on 4 polls I’ve seen with 10k plus responses, Mastodon leans older than bluesky. Unlike what’s put out there bluesky doesn’t aim to be a Twitter replacement but more so Mastodon+. Lastly, the culture on Mastodon often takes itself too seriously while bluesky is mostly horny, crapposting, awareness raising and lots of laughs
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It is easier to get into. It is easier to continue with it. There is an obvious no-brainer app.
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Being invite only makes it seem like some kind of cool club.
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This name will never not read to me as "bloo-skee"
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@otter money behind it
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Better posts. Feeds (like categories replacing hashtags) are great.
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without hashtags, I cant discover anything on bluesky, its made discoverability so much harder than mastodon imho
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They're going to add native hashtags. Not prioritized though
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Billionaire backing.
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A good write up https://buffer.com/resources/bluesky-social/
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They have the main thing masses often look for: unity (as in the state of being united, not the company). Like it or not, federation is a brand new concept that regular users can't wrap their heads around.
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Federation a brand new concept.
LOL!
You're dismissing the fact that web browsing and e-mail are federated. DNS too. Usenet. Gopher. IRC to a certain point.
Not a brand new concept.
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See my other reply. Regular users don't understand, nor care, nor even think about it. To the mainstream, of everything you've listed, only email is a common concept, and even then you have some major congregation with very few providers. It doesn't matter that your bubble is used to it, because it represents a risible percentage of the mainstream.
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Email has been around for what, 50 years? I guess that makes me a brand new concept too.
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I can guarantee you regular users don't ever think of email as a federated service nor even begin to understand how it works behind the opaque client page.
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172 comments