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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Most scientists aren’t allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don’t have the time.
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.
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.
Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.
If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…
Why would a geologist spin up a Mastodon server, period? Or any other kind of social media server?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
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).
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
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.
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.
That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I’ve seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones “didn’t made them stay as long”. For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
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.
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
- 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.
These who waited until the X take over to move away are simply following trends.
See you can be a really good scientist and not smart at the same time. Move to mastodon.
