I feel like you guys are addicted to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, Bluesky being corporate run will probably be an issue down the line, but if it becomes mainstream then people will be used to seeing .APP.INSTANCE and feel more comfortable with the fediverse interface, which I know at least for me was a big hurdle. Like seriously, the fact that the next big thing is federated, even if in name only, is a big step forward.
Expecting perfection is a huge problem in all aspects of life. People just want instant perfection and aren’t willing to work towards it. Then there’s just apathy and that leads to stagnation or worse regression.
Ohhh that’s your profile pic, I was really confused how you got verified haha
Oh no I’m definitely verified.
Half a loaf is better than no loaf
Bluesky is such a huge improvement over twitter and so many people are just ignoring that. Yes, the app is centralized, but you can still host your own data if you choose. Plus, the customizable feeds, algorithms, and moderation lists are all great.
the irony of a bsky supporter complaining about being judged because it’s not perfect.
I genuinely have no idea what you’re implying lol
I think he accidentally called you perfect.
Mastodon is gatekept to hell and back, the technicalities of federation are exposed to the user for some reason (you already lose half your potential user base right there), infighting between instances means that you won’t see the entire discourse of a post depending on which instance you’re at…
And besides all that, bsky is not as “corpo” as mastodon fanboys make it out to be. They’re on track to open up to privately hosted instances as well, and you can already run most of their backend stuff yourself.
As much as I like the ‘decentralized’ stuff, the technical part of federation should NEVER be exposed to the end user if you want the platform to be mainstream. I still don’t understand why a lot of federated projects think it’s a good idea to expose that to the end user.
Whenever Lemmy or Masto gets a flood of new users, a portion of them never make it past the instance selection and totally bail.
The user experience was designed by people who literally respond to user feedback by telling users to commit new code to the project.
It’s clearly designed by engineers who assume other users will be just like them.
This of the core of the problem. Github energy.
Fine for a hobby. Not good enough for a public-facing product.
Now take all of these replies. THIS is what they don’t understand. All of these replies tell exactly how I feel about this.
The project was started as an architectural thought experiment, not with the goals and limitations of the end user.
If bluesky ever becomes actually federated, won’t it have the same problem?
Probably not. Currently it seems on track that you’re always first on their main instance. If you’re technically inclined you could then start hosting a federated part yourself (or joining one), but this does not change that the actual entry experience is exactly the same as on Twitter, hence why transition is so insanely smooth and painless.
The way sign up currently is, probably not. It would still default to bsky.social and your average person isn’t going to think about it.
Dude, do you even email?
I think a lot of the attitude I saw on mastodon about this like a year ago was one of suspicion that they wanted an open network but didn’t use the fediverse standard
I assume the main reason is that ActivityPub is a mess and quite overcomplicated for bsky’s needs. Being permanently tied to it seems like a big risk. There’s no reason why they couldn’t make a compatibility layer later and hook into it.
Which AFAIK isn’t a standard, so… 🤷
ActivityPub is a W3C standard, though.
Oh I dis not know that! Interesting! Thanks for the correction.
If Mastodon wanted to be preferred, it should have been better. I moved to Mastodon over a year ago when the Twitter sale first happened. It was not great then and it’s gotten slightly worse since. I created a Bluesky account two days ago and it already offers exactly the experience I missed from Twitter before Elon.
Would it be better if Mastodon was good and the federated FOSS option was superior? Sure, absolutely. But, that scenario isn’t even close to the case we are presented with.
I’ve been a heavy Mastodon user for two years, and I honestly don’t see why so many people on Lemmy give it so much shit. Certainly not in favour of the likes of Bluesky.
I get WAY more engagement with my posts on there than I ever did on Twitter. And maybe I’m just at an age where I don’t give a shit about celebrity, but I couldn’t care less that all the Big Names have gone to Bluesky and Threads. It’s great not seeing the same people being shared into my TL all the time.
Can you give actual examples?
I feel the only thing that Mastodon ‘misses’ is some feed to get you addicted.
Seconded, some specific examples would be helpful.
Which is precisely what makes people actually use twitter
Might be paranoid, but I feel as if alot of the anti-mastodon sentiment is astroturfing. Might just be me and my schizo anti-corpo mind though.
the astroturfing is happening but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that makes it less real. astroturfing works or they wouldn’t do it.
I’ve got a bsky account too but I get way more engagement on my fedi accounts. I’ve been building up my follows for 15 years on the fedi so bsky never had a chance to catch up. it probably never will.
bluesky has made better choices - the starter packs and user lists are great for new users. They managed to add quote tweets but let the quoted person opt out of dog piles. It looks like they added options for custom algorithms too.
Bluesky will be enshittified but mastodon should be taking notes if they want to pick up people next wave.
The bluesky system is just way better. The local/fed feeds on masto are just wasted.
The block lists for various types of assholes are also a marvellous invention. It’s so nice to block all of MAGA at a click
I haven’t had to block a maga in a decade. my admin already took care of that.
What if we’re wrong and BlueSky just gets better? I mean, with some of the corporate trappings of old Twitter, but still user-friendly, big userbases, vibrant subcultures and banning troublemakers?
I mean even if it repeats “the Twitter mistake” that’d still be another 13-14 years to go. Who knows where short-form social media will be conceptually in that time and whether any competition in the space is even still relevant.
It will, but it still has that countdown timer over its head.
The future is the fediverse, some yet-to-be-invented non-corporate equivalent, or offline.
the concept of more than one website is so challenging for plebs.
use both and please don’t bridge bsky to the fedi.
It’s almost like the average person doesn’t care about the fediverse and decentralisation and only wants muskless twitter. Nooo clearly the normies are idiot sheep
Bluesky is Decentralized, people are moving to Bluesky because it is easier to use and has better UI and UX. The reason people are moving to Bluesky and not mastodon has nothing to do with Decentralized, it is because it is simply user friendly. I used both and I think currently that Bluesky is definitely better. One of the biggest issues is the app, many users use their phones and The mastadon apps are awful in comparison to bluesky.
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-host-a-bluesky-pds
That’s exactly the thing, mastodon has all of these nerd things attached to it that most people won’t care about, whilst BlueSky doesn’t
Yeah, Bluesky has both federation and ease of use, which is why many prefer it over Mastodon. Instead of making someone search for a server to join, Bluesky gives you a default server which makes it easier for less tech savvy users.
bluesky does not have functional federation by any reasonable measure.
It is currently early access, but should be opened to everyone later. There is also a bridge that links Bluesky and Mastadon. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
A bridge is a tool for connecting things don’t connect, it is not federation.
The relay layer/app view forces you under the control of a centralized system at a fundamental level with bluesky, the only thing meaningful about that kind of federation is hosting costs for processing and storing post data are offloaded onto the user.
…Which when you think about it is actually pretty fucking insulting to the fediverse and what is trying to be when bluesky pretends it is aiming for true federation and decentralization.
It is possible to run your own relay, but is very expensive. Unless people decide to run their own relays, Bluesky is technically centralised. You can run your own PDS for cheap through.
This, right there. What FOSS fans fail to understand is that some apps feel like a jigsaw to use for people less experienced in technology. Some people barely have an idea about how browser cookies work, and they are expected to understand the concept of manually picking up a server to create an account on, and you would still not be connected to everyone.
People are also expected to understand the concept of manually picking a brand of toothpaste. My point is that if we can’t even expect a little consumer choice (the same consumer choice we have in the real world), then we deserve all the monopolization and centralization we get.
Also, selecting a Mastodon server isn’t like some scary technical choice. It’s like a vibe check and a signup form.
Bluesky is not decentralized if you have to use their relay to access the network from your PDS
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If the reason people only want bluesky is because it’s Elon-less Twitter then they are stupid and wrong (or just ignorant). But then they can move to the next thing in 5 years when the enshittification happens.
Yup, there it is.
People who genuinely think like this (as in, that users going to Bluesky is somehow bad, surprising or something only stupid people do) are the very reason systems such as Mastodon cannot work. And sadly they naturally pervade such systems, at a development, administration and user level.
I will have to agree, what I see is people on the fediverse always talking about how others should join it and complain when people have the free will to choose other options. So far, it’s been painful to find a Mastodon instance, because the whole thing doesn’t feels intuitive, it’s hard to differentiate them, and all the topics that go on the honepage are just politics and people mentioning other platforms.
If the internet has a future, it’s on the Fediverse. We work around capitalism to avoid enshittification, or we let it defer our future further.
In the meantime, the Fediverse needs to get shiny and intuitive. The sign that something is cumbersome and hard to use is people saying “it’s not that bad”.
People may disagree with how BlueSky is organized and architected, but I get why they decided to do what they did. User experience.
Their architectural decisions mean that people don’t have to worry about instances confusing people, and the org structure means is easy to staff a proper dedicated experience team that can be working, planning, and testing before big expensive decisions are committed to code.
You forgot one main thing, 🤑🤑🤑🤑.
Filing as a B corp wouldn’t be my first choice if I was trying to prioritize getting rich.
That is how it usually starts. It start innocent but the moment you see potential money or the funding runs out you either become like OpenAI, Google or go obscure worst bankruptcy. It does not help that their protocol is basically how search engine works today. They control the flow of information and funded by venture capital.
Yeah probably. If you told me in 2013 that reddit would go to shit in 2023 I would not really do anything different. Knowing bluesky will go to shit wouldn’t really change anything (if I was a fan of the Twitter format) either.
Mastodon may or may not be good (I don’t use it), but the fact that it segments off users into different groups means it will never be a twitter replacement. The fact that twitter is essentially “public” and all sorts of people from different areas interact was basically the whole point of it.
Bluesky seems pretty nice so far and it has real momentum. Mastodon seems more along the lines of what Google+ turned into.
Mastodon doesn’t silo its users, that’s what federation is for. Everything you post on the public timeline is essentially public for everyone that’s on a federated instance that hasn’t gotten blocked.
I’m just dreading the inevitable monetization. These spaces are fun in their alpha state. But it’s just a matter of time before there’s a “Let AI help you spam Shrimp Jesus to your friends” button and a “Pay $5 to override the Block function” feature.
Why must you malign shrimp Jesus so
what do you mean?
sure, but what are you talking about? your post could apply to anything
Can you explain what you mean?
I would argue siloing is easier on bluesky - block list manager drama can definitely have a similar effect to user admin drama. The thing mastodon does poorly is discovery. The fed and local feeds are nonsense on Masto. Imo it should be replaced with local admin/user curated topical feeds and top cross server topical feeds.
Mastodon requires far more effort to create a new feed than bluesky, and that’s the major problem.
Mastodon is social media where no one comments or likes anything.
It’s like a modern art masterpiece.
maybe when I first started 15 years ago it was like this.
now I have a community that will follow me on whatever bullshit instance I create because I got a clever domain name.
You’re hanging out with the wrong people.
Had to look up bluesky. Posts are called skeets 🤣
Mutuafuckaaaaa
That’s news to me 😂
Pronounced “shiits”
Heres the thing with federation
It will always be more complicated, and lead to smaller segregated communities. This mitigstes the network effect social media services rely on
The consumer lockin then monetization lockdown cycle always sheds users. I think eventually most federated systems will gain users, albeit slowly.
This only works if a new centralized network doesnt take its place, Blueskys existence kinda proves thats not always the case
The proof is that mastodon user base is steadily going up. There hasn’t been a giant spike in a while but the barrier to monetization is too high for it to shed users from that. Its more like how wikipedia has outlived google as a resource despite wikipedia not being particularly better now than soon after it started.
I like Masodon but the user experience on Bluesky is easier and great block tools too. I don’t mind Mastodon not being mainstream, it is kinda good to have niche parts of the net still.
Nice profile picture! Do you have any suggestions of content to find on Mastodon? I’m pretty new there and I can’t find anything interesting when I open the app.
Try going to the home page of instances of accounts you like (or of instances that seem interesting) and browsing their federated feed (tap globe for “live feed” then hit “all”), you can discover tons that way.
As a general mastodon instance mas.to looks good and is a nice size with a good stable history.
You can find established, more established instances on the fediverse by surfing around a bit fedidb
I think the hate for BlueSky is proof that it’s important enough to work. Buhbye elon
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Bluesky has its own federation protocol.
I’ll be more excited about that when they start allowing larger federated instances.
I haven’t read a ton about it, I have to admit, but last I read, federated instances are limited in number of accounts.
More generally, the idea that taking crypto bro money will allow them to stay as open as Mastodon sounds unlikely to me.