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.
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.
Going to play devil’s advocate here.
Bluesky is just…better than any Fediverse microblogging platform. In terms of UI, discoverability, and keeping a balance of users in the community.
Mastodon sucks for regular people. And none of the other better platforms like Firefish ever gain enough steam to beat Mastodon because of existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub (this also includes Mastodon itself to an extent).
Mastodon is great.
The only reason why it doesn’t get as much traction is because it doesn’t manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.
what are those?
existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
There’s a couple contenders but they’re not very good. I think most FOSS people don’t WANT a facebook alternative; they’d prefer to keep their IRL identity separate from the internet. And the people who don’t care also don’t care enough to want to go federated.
There’s spacehey as a myspace alternative though. That’s pretty neat but it’s full of teenagers unfortunately.
Friendica aims at that. I’m not sure about the results as I haven’t tried it.
It still needs polish, but the biggest deficit is lack of adoption.
Platforms like Twitter encourage casual breaks between public and private space, but Facebook-like platforms are better for passively extending existing friendship circles. Or so it seems to me.
Yeah, honestly Friendica has been around for ages at this point and I assume is pretty damn mature in terms of most features… what is exactly missing here that it isn’t even worth mentioning by name when talking about replacing Facebook?
I believe you’ve hit the nail on the head, the only people I’ve noticed that really want such a social media account are generally people who were older than millennial, out of Millennials, gen Z and gen A, I don’t really see much interest in a social media account that is directly linked to your actual identity. Most of them are more interested in a pseuado-anonymous style account that only asks for a username and doesn’t actually link you to a real world identity.
Facebook was great in principle, it was intended as like a college student community and evolved from there, it was never meant to fill the goal of what the platform is doing today.
As such as Facebook deteriorates, there isn’t a huge demand for a Facebook alternative, because the people who are leaving the platform aren’t actively seeking to replace what is lost.
Would be better if it was Mastodon, but I suppose I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and good riddance to Twitter, indeed.
Same here, well said. Bluesky’s not perfect, at least it’s not Twitter. I wish more people would use it though
While there has been some onboarding QOL stuff for mastodon, Bluesky still has them beat on that.
The “People” segment in the explore menu is a nice start, but it’s still dependent on the users picking a server that somewhat matches their interests.
thing is lot of that is on purpose. mastodon and fediverse are more of an attempt to come back to the state where there is no algorithm picking for you… but too many people nowdays are simply too lazy to search and actively choose what they want to see.
what we really need is to separate content (keep that in fediverse) and content access and presentation (the interface people use to access the content). if you want a bot feeding you content whole day and for your internet to become a tv you nobody can stop you. but if you want to think amd search nobody should stop you either
I would prefer any ActivityPub instance, but press media (and in general private entities), to which scientific institutes intend diffusion, is moving to bluesky…
The thing is, bluesky is just old twitter, it will become X eventually…Bluesky sucks, but jessus, mastodon sucks in terms of usability. Its only for technical people and experience on mastodon is fatal compared to bluesky, sad that mastodon won’t take over, as it could…at least bluesky is not bad YET.
I feel like scientists should move towards open source solutions … I feel like most scientists are smart enough to launch a mastodon server, but well.
Never worked in academia eh? Plenty of dumb (and, more importantly here, computer illiterate) people there too.
I’m pretty sure there are a handful of technically literate scientists who are able to install servers lmao.
Being a scientist doesn’t mean you have the technical knowledge to run a public facing server.
Being a scientist kinda means to me you’re able to follow a very easy to understand guide to install mastodon on …
Being a scientist also kinda means understanding what are your strengths, and how you can combine them with other people who are smart along very specific narrow vectors.
Being a scientist means understanding that if you work together with the right kind of smart, curious people you can build amazing things that will improve the world.
Being a scientist in 2025 means understanding the modern business world is utter bullshit and will rot any science it touches to the core.
Being a scientist, like truly living that ethos, means being someone who believes the truth is important and that there are power structures who will fight tooth and nail to subdue that truth or hoard it to themselves for personal gain.
Being a scientist thus effectively means that I would expect that after having a brief conversation with you that you would at least understand the grave danger that entrusting science communication in another for profit social media company poses and how it doesn’t seem sensible to take that risk when the actual material barriers to creating Fediverse communities as alternatives aren’t actually that high no matter how much it feels like the barriers are impossible and the network effect is unbeatable.
Don’t get me wrong, those hurdles are real, the fediverse can be confusing, there are lots of growing pains here… however, not every scientist needs to become an expert in selfhosting Fediverse software, and not every scientist needs to become a Fediverse evangelist (although it wouldn’t hurt), but we do need to connect boldly and clearly the tragic hypocrisy of supposedly truth valuing people (scientists, science communicators and leaders that defend science) all shepherding dutifully onto another platform that will silence and betray them violently.
Scientists are inherently aligned with modern progressive politics, or rather scientists need to understand they are at everything up to physical bodily danger from being hurt by conservatives now and they need to understand that makes them fundamentally aligned with modern progressive politics.
There is no “I don’t want to get political here” and the failure of the science community at large to recognize how embracing Bluesky as if it was a genuine solution to the unfolding catastrophe of science being defunded and destroyed is embarrassing. Those of us on the Fediverse should be kind, but also we should make fun of them for not using their brains. They clearly have them. Fucking use them you fools.
Bluesky is a for profit corporate venture, the same EXACT incentives that now have placed us all very much in danger and have placed the very funding structures of science in danger the world over (at least in US/European connected science communities) are at play in Bluesky and Scientists betray the begrudging respect the public has for their intelligence (even if they pretend to hate Scientists) by treating Bluesky like it is safe. Bluesky is not safe. This is no different than scientists endorsing any other thing that is fundamentally a threat to the health and safety of innocent people. It is just new, people are scared and scientists are largely too overwhelmed to see things for how they are.
At the end of the day, every Scientist needs to hear to their face that Bluesky is a threat to science, science education and the free access to knowledge in general the world over, they need to defend their choice to go on Bluesky anyways instead of Mastodon (both is fine tho) along the terms of what motivates their pursuit of studying and doing science. I don’t care if scientists are already overwhelmed and scared, they along with everyone else have all the information to understand why choosing Bluesky to throw the weight of science communication behind is dangerous, and it is unacceptable to give them a pass because 2025 is a terrifying mess. 2025 is a terrifying mess for reasons DIRECTLY RELATED TO THIS DISCUSSION. Scientists should understand that better than almost anyone else if they are paying attention, and many do which is why Mastodon is full of scientists!
Bluesky is a public benefit corporation. That’s very different from for profit
It has investors, those investors are going to want money.
Sure, but the openness of the protocols, especially the portability of accounts, makes it hard for them to push negative changes on users.
Most scientists aren’t allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don’t have the time.
Or know how. Just because they are scientists doesn’t mean that they are necessarily particularly computer literate. I once had to explain to a university professor that wireless electricity doesn’t exist, and the Wi-Fi is only for internet. So yeah.
I mean, wireless electricity tech does exist, it just sucks and is horribly inefficient at any reasonable distance.
What… Are you taking about? I know hundreds of scientists and the vast majority of them interact with social media just as much as normal people.
I’d reckon that managing a social media server is more involved than just using social media.
Not required to join the fediverse, only to host your own community yourself, which is NOT what scientists need to do (unless they want to).
And when is the next circle jerk about how making an account on the Fediverse is too complicated for “normal people?”
Using social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get more mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren’t the ones who operate these things. Merely getting the approval to get the project started is an immense task.
My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.
Any public facing IT system stood up in the higher ed system I am familiar with, requires IT support to be engaged. A part of that process is sending the request through a software review board, department’s IT, centralized IT, and then assigned to a project manager.
Otherwise, it would be considered a rogue service, and turned off at the edge, and core routers.
University IT departments don’t want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It’s got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it’s just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn’t going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
It doesn’t make any sense for the University or specific professors to officially host a fediverse community in the first place, it is the wrong system of governance and community ownership here. Something like a student club or independent association of professors and students should host fediverse communities that then become unofficially associated with the University and the University should be hands off unless something really egregious happens.
The only reason to create a fediverse server directly under the auspices of a University or under an official capacity for the University would be to use the fediverse server as a public communication tool (like how Universities and other institutions might use Twitter), which actually isn’t a bad idea but is totally separate from what people are suggesting here…
Bluesky is open source though
No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing ads on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network… it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
3rd party moderation tools already exists, using the same API as the official moderation system, available to subscribe to even directly in the official app. If you don’t want bluesky’s moderation decisions enforced, you can run a different client which don’t apply the bluesky labels (or if the bluesky appview blocks something entirely, you can circumvent that and retrieve it directly from that user’s PDS)
is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users
What
The network is specifically designed around portability and content addressing so they can’t lock you in
it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
There are already plenty of people running their own self hosted PDS servers to host their account, talking to the rest of the bluesky users, using 3rd party moderation filters and 3rd party clients, with 3rd party feed generators to view stuff like topic specific feeds
Also there’s bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
Is the appview part of Bluesky open source? If so why not? How does that not make saying “Bluesky is open source” an inaccurate statement, or at least an incomplete statement? Can somebody reasonably run their own relay while handling a realistic amount of data from interactions?
Also there’s bridgy so you can talk across Mastodon / bluesky by letting bridgy mirror posts and replies between the two networks
A bridge is something you build and maintain, requiring constant maintenance, that joins a place that is connected with a place that is not.
is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users What
Typo, sorry I meant to put *ads in there
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages/bsky
The old design was built to scale to a few million users. The new backend is revised to handle ~hundreds of millions. They’ll releasing bits and pieces at a time.
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it’s more feature complete than windows (it isn’t).
I use lemmy because I hate u/spez, not because it’s more feature complete than reddit (it isn’t).
I use blender because it’s free and it’s actually kinda great, if all free and open source software was like blender, then it would be a no-brainer to use FOSS all of the time, and it would be easy to convince the normies to do the same.
also also
I’m using linux mint, i have minor complaints about it, but nothing worse than what microsoft is currently doing with windows. It’s just different, and that bothers me. middle click paste is the bane of my existence, but other people swear by it. Just before I switched over, I learned about windows 10’s built in emoji keyboard, and I really liked that. A year later (literally last week) I discovered a program that does most of what the windows emoji thingy did, and I can manually edit a keybind for the function to accomplish amost the same thing. FOSS, yay, it’s free if you don’t value your time in currency amounts. FOSS could be so good if only it were good.
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
Yes. But there is nothing bluesky does that mastodon doesn’t. It’s a platform to write short text posts and have it viewed by other people. It’s not rocket science.
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it’s more feature complete than windows (it isn’t).
lol… “Feature complete” if you want terrible features.
i just want it to work without having to fix it
Yeah. Another Linux mint user here, and when it comes to “feature” differences with Windows it’s usually for the better. I describe it to people as the difference between an OS trying to fulfill the diverse needs of all the stakeholders in a mega corporation, versus an OS that was made to serve the needs of only the users.
For a normal mainstream user that pretty much just needs a web browser and maybe a local document/spreadsheet editor it is faster and stays out of the way.
For a power user that fiddles with the system like a lot of people on Lemmy probably are, you learn different ways to fix different issues on the two. Linux allows you the control to do what you want with your machine, and that also means you can do bad stuff. So there’s always a tradeoff.
For people somewhere in the middle, maybe a normal user who has niche hardware for their hobby, it’s a toss up. I’m sure Windows comes out ahead due to its popularity, which means that’s where the vendor puts their effort.
Never meet your heroes. If a scientist is human, they’re as fallible as any other. Just like some teachers aren’t there because they’re passionate. Some legitimately are bad if you ever had parent teacher conferences. Not passion nor intelligence saves you from making poor choices
Just because they are using Mastodon they are bad people? What the hell kind of take is that?
I’m just saying, because someone is a scientist absolutely does not absolve them of human fallibility. I just don’t like the take of “because scientist, therefore smart or wise” and that’s not true, they’re just (hopefully) educated and credible in their one specific field and nothing else. I wouldn’t blindly trust a scientist’s choice of social network. It makes no sense. I’d instead trust their education on their specific field.
Right but Mastodon is irritating to use, isn’t it? It has actual problems. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that it doesn’t have problems and therefore anyone not using it is being ignorant.
It’s a take that apparently requires a lack of reading comprehension on your part.
And absolute rudeness on yours.
I’m just a little sick of this attitude that everyone on here seems to have that everyone should be using Mastodon without consideration for the fact that it does have quite a large number of downsides. It’s ridiculous not to accept that fact and not to want to improve the platform so that the downside aren’t there and then people would use it.
You can’t berate people for not using the product you want them to use if the product you want them to use is annoying to use
Some of us have. There are a few science focused servers.
Most people who work as “scientists” aren’t actually scientists.
Define “Scientist”.
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.
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
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!”
There’s no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
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.
Why switch to BlueSky if you have Mastodon…
I’m on both and Mastodon is missing (at least in any easy to use way) most of the features that make Bluesky such a good destination:
- instant add subscribe lists
- subscribable block lists
- custom feeds/subscribable algorithms
- keyword/topic blocks
- nuclear block where you never see the blocked person again
- optional discover feed
- DM preferences
All these things (and more I’m sure I’m forgetting), make Bluesky very quick to get started with and very powerful for honing your feeds to be exactly how you want and free of harassment and trolling.
I am still trying with Mastodon, but it’s really slow going and I can fully understand why people wouldn’t bother. After a year I am way behind where I was in a week with Bluesky.
It does have keyword blocking.
Not sure what nuclear block means but I can’t think of any way a blocked person could be seen again. It even has above nuclear blocking where you block their entire server.
It has custom feeds but the implementation with lists is very fiddly and I wish it would be improved.
There is a trending posts section but I think you want a personalised discover feed? Which will never happen of course.
Thanks for the update. Yes the recommended feed is personalized. It’s optional. The main feed has no algorithm, just who you follow.
Keyword blocking is a bit more sophisticated on Bluesky I think as they have a crowdsourced tagging system which allows you to opt in an out also of tagged words regardless of whether they appear in the body of the post.
The tagging sounds great. One of the problems with masto is showing the hashtags in the body making posts that use them look awful, and of course being entirely set by the author
Yeah it makes it look like a 4chan post.
Yes the recommended feed is personalized. It’s optional. The main feed has no algorithm, just who you follow.
The thing is, a lot of social media sites have or had this. YouTube has the subscriptions feed. Twitter has (I don’t know anymore) a following feed. Reddit used to keep posts on your homepage only being from subscribed subreddits.
One problem. People don’t use them. They see maintaining subscriptions as work and so want to be fed posts by algorithm.
Been watching @TechConnectify 's latest?! He has some interesting stats on the subscriptions feed on YT in there - and yes, it’s shockingly low.
I think people want plug and play. Maintaining subs isn’t work as such after you’ve set it up, but it does take that initial setup. https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuABeen watching @TechConnectify 's latest?!
Yes. Yes I have.
I use them. I use platforms more that have them. I leave platforms that don’t.
But to each their own I guess.
Thanks for the list! As someone who has never used any Twitter-like site before (I guess microblog is the right term…?), and recently made a profile on Bluesky only to support it (I have used it briefly ~3 times since joining): what are the pros of Mastodon that Bluesky doesn’t have?
As far as I can tell, the advantages of Mastodon over Bluesky are:
- Well implemented federation
Haha, thanks! I know it’s quite important for a good bunch of people here (on a federated site), but I guess I’ll stick with Bluesky then. Thanks for the insights! : )
It’s important because, along with the ability to migrate accounts, it prevents/deters enshittification. In betting Bluesky will hit that wall in the next few years (I’m guessing they’ll never properly implement federation).
Yeah I agree that we will probably happen, but the problem is using Mastodon is such a pain for the vast majority of people, it’s not worth the hassle.
And I say that to someone who uses both platforms.
I know; as much as I love the concept, I can already see .world soaking up most of the users, which might not be the best thing for federation - but TBF when I came over from Reddit, my main goal was to find something decent and similar, and federation was secondary at best for me; so I’ll see if it gets any worse, but for the moment, the first list definitely overweighs the second “list” for me.
- No “starter kits” which are just positive-feedback loops for popular accounts
- No “algorithm” which promotes popularity or engagement over quality or relevance
Bluesky’s main feed is totally algorithm free, it’s just the people you follow’s posts in chronological order, same as mastodon.
Starter kits are optional, but they allow you to get started in hours rather than months. For me, they made the difference between a vibrant and interesting feed well tailored towards my interests, and a very sparse feed that I didn’t use on Mastodon. For me they were the difference between a useful social network and a non-useful one.
Main one is that it doesn’t manipulate your feed with stuff “you might enjoy” so you can’t be easily manipulated by the people setting the algorithm. Of course, this is exactly why people find it hard. People want to be fed stuff and told what to consume.
Bluesky also has the option of doing this, or not.
Do you refer to the “Following” Vs “Discover” feed?
Apparently it’s very noticeable when a post hits the discover feed. The quality of responses dives off a cliff.
There’s a new option available now for reply controls, you can limit it to just people who follow you. While it’s a very low bar, it’s enough of a threshold for most randoms to not bother following just to reply to you
And even without that, I still have felt that the quality of replies doesn’t drop THAT much one it hits Discover - but it may be partly who I follow/am recommended, that block lists are doing a great job of eliminating trolls+spam, and I just automatically ignore any stupid/low effort stuff (“wow you are the best at that thing you posted about”, “that js amazjng i have never seen a linux before” or whatever).
This option will only help, though.
This one is so important. After a year my mastodon feed is perfectly tailored for me. When I open it I enjoy my time there and the posts I see. I can leave whenever I want, and without a feel of rage or anxiety. But the most important part is that I don’t feel the compulsive need to open it every other second. It’s to liberating in contrast with the algorithm led manipulation.
That’s not really a fair description of what’s going on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a recommendation algorithm, can you imagine trying to use Netflix if it didn’t tell you about any of the shows and you just have to guess and type in a film in order to see if it existed?
The problem with algorithms is when they’re the only option, or when they are invisible and you think you are getting a timeline of people you’ve subscribed to, but really you’re getting an algorithm optimizing retention. As long as it’s just recommending stuff there’s nothing wrong with it, in fact as a lot of people point out, it’s kind of necessary.
The world functioned before recommendation algorithms. Even the internet did. Once upon a time, when Goggle worked, it didn’t modify its results based on your history.
Netflix could operate fine with classifications, ratings good tagging and search. It doesn’t need to monitor your viewing habits and recommend something based on them.
Yes but it would be more irritating to use than without which is my point.
The world function perfectly well without electricity but I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting that we go back to a pre-electrified age just because technically it’s possible.
I’ve seen a few larger creators say the reply management is bad at scale, too. The thing I mostly like is that here I am, reading Lemmy from Mastodon.
Yeah I’d prefer Mastodon to implement all these features and win, but I understand why it’s not winning ATM.
Same. Plus I came back here because Bluesky got too noisy so I’m kind of happy if it stays small!
Lemmy is still my favorite, I was never a huge fan of the Twitter model, but I enjoy taking part in the destruction of X.
over time I’ll probably end up moving over to Lemmy tbh. I think I’d prefer more of a forum vibe. I was never a Redditor so I didn’t “get” it until I started following Lemmy feeds.
Cause the name is hard to remember… I was trying to yesterday and the closest I could get is megatron and megalodon
The name should have been MinBB (Mastadon is not Blue Bird).
It’s a big elephant and you send “Toots!”.
How do you confused that with a cynical robot and a giant shark? You’d post “Quips!” or “Bites!”. Wouldn’t work at all. 🙄
“Bites” is so cool…
I tried masterdon, mostertant (I don’t know what that one is) and eventually needed to look up the name from an E-Mail…
In a word, audience. I’d prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don’t trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.
They might do the Twitter. Jack Dorsey has already left the board saying exactly that.
I think there’s a fairly serious problem for large accounts on mastodon but I will never have one so I can’t quite understand it myself.
Something like dealing with replies / scolds without spending all day blocking is too hard. It doesn’t help that “no algorithm” means “show first reply at the top” so quick replies can dominate comments.
The bit I don’t understand is why this is fine on blue sky. Is it just different users? I can’t quite believe that but I can’t see why blue sky would be less annoying.
It’s not that it’s less annoying, it’s that it was in the right place at the right time to capture sufficient network effect…
There’s plenty of people on masto saying they have accounts on both but prefer bsky due to difficulty managing replies.
As I say I don’t really understand it but it’s a real thing big accounts experience.
Guess why? /s For real, people, some of you live in a bubble…
These who waited until the X take over to move away are simply following trends.
Why switch to Mastodon when there is Misskey?
Why use Misskey when there is Hubzilla?
I’ve yet to find a multi language or English speaking misskey it appears they’re all Japanese
You could spin one up this evening if you wanted. Or go use catodon.social.
That’s not the point. The point is, there are reasons Mastodon is being rejected, just like there are reasons you seemingly cannot pay people to use a Misskey-based or Hubzilla-based website.
It’s not where the people are going, and the public or semi-public figures are going to follow the people.
Gotta try the Misskey forks for English
Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
Agreed, at least it’s happening with Meta too.
wait… is it? dont threaten me with a good time
Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
And it’s ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
i get it, its so frustrating. with bluesky we are just hitting the snooze button, theres bound to be problems with a privately owned social network again.
the fact people are categorically rejecting a nazi platform for being nazi is actually pretty refreshing though.
It really isn’t minuscule, it’s still confusing enough for the vast majority of people. Just the fact that there are different servers and them having to learn about that is enough to put people off. Anything more complicated than basic sign-up/in weeds out 90% of people, every tiny little thing they need to learn makes it less likely they’ll even think about using it.
This is obvious. The way you and many others here think about how knowledgeable, tech-literate and willing to lift just one extra finger the average person is isn’t correct, people are dumb and lazy. And it hurts the fediverse as a whole and slows adoption.
Your opinion and my reply here have been said thousands of times, I don’t understand how your kind of ignorance and misunderstanding is still so prevalent, I see it almost weekly.
your kind of ignorance and misunderstanding
I was with you up until this. I was taking about my perception but thanks for generalizing and passing judgement anyway, jerkface.
I also see your kind of bullshit regularly on here, with many not giving the benefit of the doubt, not asking follow up questions, and therefore assuming the worst takes. Every single time.
Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).
Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)
In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.
I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.
an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This question is extremely easy to answer. We all did it. I don’t think people on Lemmy are some kind of master race. smh.
For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being “join mastodon.social”, with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to “bluesky social”.
It’s a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it’s difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This is such a cop out and makes no sense. A “server” is basically just a website. The only reason we call them servers/instances is because they are are running the same software in the background and can communicate with each other - that’s it. So we put them all under common flags such as “Mastodon” for those who use the Mastodon “template”, and “Fediverse” for all the “templates” that can communicate with each other.
This is literally just a problem with marketing and communication, people hear “instances”/“servers” and they shit themselves because they can’t be bothered to do a bit of research. In reality they are just different websites that can communicate with each other. You have the “shakedown.social” website, the “dads.cool” website, the “bookwyrm.social” website, and plenty of others; they are all Twitter clones (Mastodon) and they all allow you to see the content posted on the others.
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Your email server doesn’t also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for [email protected] and hotmail bans you, you’ll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It’s apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board,
This is just untrue. There’s almost nothing to Twitter, IG, etc., while many bulletinboards are far more complicated.
No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that’s associated with logging into your smartphone.
Most people use several email servers for work, school, personal, etc.
Somehow those dolts figured it out. Shocking. \s
For e-mail, it does not really make a difference.
Good luck with you hotmail account… Or using Outlook… etc.
I use both Outlook and non-Outlook e-mail (the former forced by my school) and never had problems.
“How can I send Gmails?”
Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
What happens when their server expenses aren’t covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over… oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn’t make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They’re not going to do it again.
What happens when their server expenses aren’t covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
What happens when BlueSky does this?
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies.
Answering your own question there.
Just to be clear… I’m a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY’s governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it’s a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.
This isn’t good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we’re centralizing the network!
This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.
Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don’t push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.
IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
I’m so tired of this nonsense. The very simple answer is “literally any server”. It really doesn’t matter. At this point most apps have a default server.
Except it does matter. Your choice of server affects what content you’re allowed to see and what people you’re allowed to interact with.
Yes but no, not really. Most instances federate with all the same other instances.
Exactly! And even if a person gets it wrong, you’re encouraged to make an account elsewhere without fault or foul. That’s what I did. And what was I looking for when deciding on a server? “A general purpose server.” Oh, look World seems to be it, what a coincidence that it’s the top suggestion. lol…
I don’t understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don’t want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.
That’s true by and large and we also don’t have enough moderators here as is.
And for reasons I don’t understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don’t transition to the fediverse, as if they won’t bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).
Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I’m curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I’m not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.
The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.
In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.
Presumably either because they’ve not heard of the Fediverse, because almost nobody has, and/or because they want people to actually see what they post.
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
B/c people are indoctrinated under capitalism to need some kinda daddy.
Probably because it has an algorithm
This.
Many people like stuff getting recommending to them algorithmically.
Exactly. I’ve curated my Mastodon feed way more than Bsky, and still, it’s incredibly boring. Great if you want to use socials less.
It also tends to overvalue new stuff, so whoever screams the most occupies the most space in the feed.
tech and age, need for investment.
- fediverse is complicated for scientists not doing computer sciency stuff
- senior researchers are less flexible with new tech, so similarity w twitter means they don’t have to learn a new system
- Already present audience means there’s little risk in investing time in BS.
It doesn’t though.
Isn’t BlueSky part of a fediverse?
A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub/the one you’re on right now)
Why is ActivityPub “the” Fediverse? “Fediverse” is very broad and encompasses multiple protocols, a lot of which predate ActivityPub becoming commonplace.
The original Fediverse apps are still around and don’t use ActivityPub. For example, StatusNet / GNU Social use OStatus and Identica uses Activity Streams / ActivityPump (which was the protocol before ActivityPub). diaspora (if it’s still around) used its own protocol too.
Some of the older apps have adapted to use ActivityPub, while some of them still exist in their own separate part of the Fediverse.
Because a fediverse is any group of technologies that talk to each other via a common protocol. In 2025 that’s ActivityPub and has been for awhile. It would be one hell of a stretch to assert that a single platform with its own home made protocol that doesn’t talk to any other technology in the entire fediverse as part of that fediverse. So at best you can say Bluesky has its own fediverse. And if one fediverse is going to be “the fediverse” it’s going to be the one that actually connects all the most common platforms people use today, including Diaspora.
Diaspora doesn’t use ActivityPub, does it? It’s still a Fediverse app though, and still fairly widely used.
It would be one hell of a stretch to assert that a single platform with its own home made protocol that doesn’t talk to any other technology in the entire fediverse as part of that fediverse. So at best you can say Bluesky has its own fediverse.
I agree with this.
Oh, looks like it doesn’t. It’s Friendica that uses both ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
He never had ownership. The investment was in the form of a contract to build the protocol, not buying shares.
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).
