I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it’s more popular than Mastodon is that it’s more centralized and in practical terms that means it’s easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it’s the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it’s waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
I never had a Xitter account so take what I say with a grain of salt, as I only interacted with the platform as a spectator.
For me it was funny to watch as I slowly saw people dive into madness over the most irrelevant things.
It didn’t matter if it was left or right people still lost all senses over unimportant things like Hunter Biden’s laptop or this week’s conspiracy theory.
I opened Mastodon and as I scroll through I see the following order:
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- something linux related (usually hector martin)
- republican bad post
And I get it, republican is bad, but after reading 3-4 republic bad posts my mental state needs a break or something different which is what Xitter was able to do. Some new music being announced/discussed, maybe a video game, maybe a joke.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
I personally think that the problem is rooted in defederation, it’s being used willy-nilly like it doesn’t have effect on the people using the platform. But not becoming an echo chamber is essential to a platform’s long term health. If I know that a platform has the same message for me when I open the app I’ll just start using it less, which is what happened with Lemmy sadly, I open my feed and it’s full of dystopian and republican posts, I just don’t bother anymore.
Incoherent rant over.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
Isn’t the whole thing about BlueSky that your feed is your feed though? You actively select and curate what you want. So if you want new music, games, comedy - follow new music, games, and comedy. Sure, those accounts might then post other things sometimes, but by and large, that’s my understanding of BSky.
In the first paragraph I mentioned that I don’t have an account, I never had one on Xitter mastodon or BS. That’s my point of view, and from what it seems it’s always politics.
Your rant is 100% sensible and/or valid and/or based or whatever one says these days.
If a user wants their own echo chamber, let them cultivate it themselves. The hosts should not decide for them, and the choice to defederate should be based on practical/material/legal concerns only.
I think you need to curate your feeds better. My experience doesn’t match yours.
I haven’t used Mastodon, but if it’s anything like Lemmy, most people won’t want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.
To me the biggest issue with federated platforms is defederation: deliberately breaking interoperability.
Like, imagine if email servers (the original federated network) blocked whole domains as aggressively Mastodon or even Lemmy servers do? It never would have worked.
most people won’t want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
What have you seen that convinced you of this? Has this been studied?
They planned ahead to make it popular, twitter developed it while losing money, my conspiracy theory is their goal was always to transition to bluesky since its model is more sustainable for long term control
That isn’t a conspiracy theory. That was, in fact, the original plan. Jack Dorsey explicitly stated this from the outset. However, due to reasons (Wikipedia doesn’t go into specifics), the project lead decided to make Bluesky independent from Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, he severed all ties.
When you sign up with Bluesky, it gives you the choice to sign up with the big main server or with an auxiliary server. Just like Lemmy does.
The problem is that when Lemmy got hit with a big influx of users, the main server couldn’t handle the load, so they quit accepting new users. This confused and upset a lot of people, because now they had to go shopping for another instance to apply to, and many of the bigger ones weren’t accepting new users, either, because of the same problem. This was a crucial moment for the adoption of the platform, and the infrastructure just wasn’t there to handle it.
EDIT: Shit, I think I’m misremembering that. That’s what happened with Mastodon. Although, it could’ve happened with Lemmy, too. In fact, it’s a problem with all of these social networks that aren’t run by gigantic corporations. People expect a certain level of service, and you can’t provide that unless you have a ton of money.
oof. blue sky was created by the guy who made twitter wasn’t it? if he sells to the next bond villain, blue sky will just become twitter 2.0.
open source, decentralized.
i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
FOSS is the final destination after people get sick of capitalism ruining every other app/site.
People usually don’t go back to shitty products unless they have no choice. Linux users don’t go back to Windows. I’ll never use an Adobe product again. Etc.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
I wouldn’t say never, but fedverse projects will need to find ways to smooth off the rough edges. Also the more enshittifcation happens the more I think people will be willing and able to get past the rough edges. If any one of the services breaks through and becomes mainstream, it’ll provide a roadmap to success for other services and people will be more comfortable with the concepts.
Look at Linux’s popularity over the
yearsdecades. I’ve used it since I was 10 years old twenty years ago. It is absolutely climbing. FOSS hasn’t even peaked yet lol
Yes but it’s also a good sign that he left the project some time ago. He’s all about NOSTR now.
Now all governments around the globe and other public services and we.are getting somewhere.
Proof that people rarely know much about anything outside of their field. They’ll just be playing this song and dance again when the Bluesky owner cashes in.
If/when that happens, its still better than giving twitter any traffic.
There is at least some (admittedly subpar) federation possible. So if the need is great enough, someone may take up the challenge.
From what I understand, Bsky didn’t actually provide much (if any) OSS code to create the federated apps, just the protocol. So there would need to be tons of work done to create it. Some people were (rightly) pointing out that time might be better spent improving existing solutions like Mastodon, rather than freely providing more value to a for-profit company.
Almost everything is available. You can run your own account host, feed generators, moderation services, app servers (appview, relay) and most code is open. The only thing not open is a bunch of custom scaling optimizations (like database configurations) and configuration for the official recommendation algorithm & spam filtering mod tools, and stuff like that. All the rest is available, and the things that’s missing aren’t necessary unless you want to match their user count (but then you can probably build it yourself)
Sort of like how they moved out of Florida and Texas. Repubs want a brain drain for some reason.
I would prefer any ActivityPub instance, but press media (and in general private entities), to which scientific institutes intend diffusion, is moving to bluesky…
When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.
First time seeing HTTP code 451
because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.
“Sorry, it’s literally impossible for us not to sell your data!”
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
There’s no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
Bluesky has a lot more normies on it while mastodon is mostly early-adopter types. Mastodon, in my experience, is either very technical people (software engineers and other tech people) or very political people. Bluesky has normal people on it
I checked out threads for a day and I liked it because the algorithm wasn’t jamming a bunch of outrage content down my throat but that’s the only thing I can say about it. Haven’t used it since then (deleted my entire meta account)
Took me like a day on bluesky to find all the funny people. Never saw any funny people on mastodon. :-(
The comedians don’t use it. Why would they, there isn’t that much of an audience there. Also I don’t think there’s even particularly political people on it for pretty much the same reason. All of the political commentators I follow either post on bluesky or post on both platforms, somewhat eliminating the need for Masterdon at all (assuming that’s the kind of content you want to follow).
At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so they at least have to consider the public good in their decision-making and not just profit. May not be much, but it’s a start.
What like OpenAI?
OpenAI was always set up in a stupid way though. It was always for profit business that owned a charity, so there was always this potential to go into the “for-profit exclusively” direction.
If you look at news articles from a few years ago even back then there were people saying that the name isn’t really appropriate. GPT has never been open source at any point.
How is that regulated?
May not be much, but it’s a start.
Actually, when you tell people something is a start but it is actually a false start that doesn’t deliver on the fundamental promises at all, it is much worse than having a much slower start…
At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation
🤡 🤡 🤡 🪴 🐶 👶 🤡
^ people that think that actually matters in 2025
All these people - they don’t learn.
For microblogs NOSTR is already better than everything else, right now. Provided you don’t care much about keeping the same identity over years, cause an identity is a pubkey there, used directly (no temporary identities signed by it or something), so with more popularity those will be lost again and again.
I don’t use microblogs, just it seems to have that functionality functioning perfectly and in distributed fashion.
If you don’t like cryptobros there (less and less dominant over time btw), then BlueSky might raise even bigger suspicions.
Non-EU folk - this website won’t open in EU because they don’t want to follow our local user privacy protections. What they’re going to do with your data? Who knows.
man that is so cheeky of them!
Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲
But yeah, you’re 100% right.
Cool. I’m going out on a limb and saying Bluesky seems pretty based so far. I made an account when it was announced, and it’s pretty cool. Nice app, seemingly good mission statement.
I don’t want to dismiss something until it actually turns to shit. If it’s good now, I’ll use it now. When it turns to crap, I’ll just jump off. I’ll always have Lemmy and Mastodon as my mains, so I don’t see the harm personally. 🤷♂️ Let’s just hope it’ll last for the scientists’ sake.
Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it’s time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.
Why is it a problem? If a tool is good now, I’ll use it now.
I don’t stop myself from buying a new axe just because it’ll break eventually, you know what I mean?
Although obviously if there was an axe that never would break, I’d buy that! But maybe there are trade-offs. Maybe the never-breaking axe has a complicated handle or something. I don’t know, I’m trying my best with the axe analogy to describe Bluesky vs Mastodon. 😅 Hopefully it’s clear enough!
It’s a problem for the same reason twitter dying sucks… The network effect is important, and maintaining yours during a slow, piecemeal mass migration is hard. Which is why I’m sticking with mastodon now, despite more of my relevant network being on BS.
We can avoid it ever becoming shit when a wannabe dictator buys it if we make it impossible to sell: like mastodon and other federated options.
Right, that’s the sure-fire way. But if a platform is better in some way than another, I’m inclined to use it, as long as it’s morally just to do so.
I like Bluesky because it’s more like Twitter was. But I like Mastodon because of how liberated it is. So I’ll use both, probably, until Bluesky turns to shit (or doesn’t).
Jack Dorsey never had ownership (just directed an investment) and left the board (didn’t agree with moderation, lol)
Jay also isn’t majority owner.
It’s a public benefit corporation too so they don’t have a profit requirement.
The harder parts with decentralizing content-addressed systems like it is scaling open spaces (like how a microblog is technically one big shared space). You need big caches and big indexes. They’re working actively on making it easier for others to run those app servers. There’s already a few independent projects building them. Federating account hosting and feed generation and moderation services are all live already
Jack Dorsey has nothing to do with Bluesky
Aside from being its founder. I know he left the board, but I haven’t seen any reason to believe he gave up ownership rights.
He never had ownership. The investment was in the form of a contract to build the protocol, not buying shares.
Leaving the board of directors is pretty much as giving up ownership rights. He has nothing to do with Bluesky anymore and he makes us sure he doesn’t want to.
It means he doesn’t directly manage it. Proof that he sold his ownership to somebody else would be evidence of giving up ownership rights.
Leaving the board of directors means no day to day control, but he could still exert influence on a shareholders vote.
He’s not a shareholder, and also it’s a public benefit corporation so shareholders have less power over the board
Equity ownership is not public. Why would he sell?
Neat, I have an account on there already.
