Is it just the momentum and word of mouth, or are there improved features as well?
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Not a lot. Simpler signup flow and ecosystem, more twitter-like timeline and features, better discoverability and some communities that aren’t on Mastodon. FOSS diehards can mince about it all they want and blame idiot users, but the simple fact is people who don’t live and breathe technology still have lots to offer a social network, and Mastodon continues to alienate them in design and in community. Lemmy does too.
I like Mastodon and Lemmy, a lot. I prefer them to the alternatives. But I just signed up for BlueSky and I’m enjoying it a lot even routed through the Mastodon bridge, simply because there are more diverse communities there, whereas my Mastodon feed is 90% tech and dev people despite spending hours and hours hunting for people I used to follow on Twitter. Getting big App.net flashbacks.
I think a ton of what’s wrong with lemmy and mastadon can be attributed to the bias of the user based. They skew very tech literate and liberal. Simple one click sign up and smooth onboarding into a user experience is the only way you will get the mass appeal of something like Twitter, reddit etc. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing honestly… A person is smart, People are dumb.
Artificial scarcity (invites) and VC funding
like shooting fish in a barrel
Forgive my ramblings, but here’s the main differences I see, from a community perspective:
Bluesky’s for people who loved twitter circa 2015
Mastodon’s for people who loved the format but hated the way the platform made use of it. The community is FOSS-focused and anti-corporate.
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate, but they still want their social media to be on a single platform and tend to dislike federation
Mastodon folks tend to be in smaller circles and more tech enthusedFeatures-wise, Mastodon kills the algorithm in favour of chronological timelines and lists, while Bluesky embraces algorithms, allowing people to even make their own algorithms for the platform. Bluesky’s AT Proto uses “DIDs” to identify users, which are associated directly with a domain[1]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub’s @actor@my.domain.com.
Federation’s still not enabled so I have no clue how things will look and feel on that front, nor am I familiar enough with the protocol to make any claim about how versatile it is. ActivityPub is flexible enough to be a Twitter clone, a reddit clone, a blogging platform, a youtube clone, a twitch clone, a goodreads clone, or several other formats. AT Proto’s currently only proven to work for a Twitter clone.
or subdomain ↩︎
I would argue that most Bluesky users don’t necessarily dislike federation, but rather have no idea what it is, or what the larger Fediverse is.
Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.
He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.
It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate
Bluesky is a for profit company with a crypto person as the CEO and Jack Dorsey on the board so good luck to them I guess
Oh ya, no, 100%. The company is still a for-profit corporation that needs to make ends meet come the 31st. The userbase is what I’m talking about there, and specifically their unprincipled stance wrt corporate control, in paying lip-service to hating corpos, yet wanting everything to be structured around a centralized entity and team who makes it easy to blame someone (1) for anything that goes wrong.
It’s a public benefit
Look, on Mastodon you have to pick a server. That’s just too hard to do.
That’s why email never took off.
unironically this.
You think ‘oh it’s not that hard to just pick a sever’, but it is. Most people look at it and go 'well my favorite influencer or friend is on X, but I can only make an account on Y. Can I still communicate with them?! Which advantage has sever Y over server Z? etc. It’s it’s ONE barrier which is one barrier too much for many people (on top of all the new things they have to learn anyway when they decide to get on a new social network)
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do - and it’s scary to them to be confronted with a question about system architecture, when all they want to do is read news or memes.
And it’s interesting that you mention email, because I’d argue email has the exact same problem. Depending on which country you live in, you’ll notice that most people use primarily one email provider per region/country. Why? because their friends use the same email provider. You know how many people told me “well, I don’t have email, but I can give you my Gmail if you want…?” Email just ‘took off’ because it had nothing to compete with for 20 years and businesses depended on it as well.
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do
I don’t think you at all need to understand federation other than it means you can join from multiple places and that typically they mostly all talk so just pick a medium to popular one.
I still don’t really understand exactly how federation works and I don’t think it hinders me at all to not understand it.
Sarcasm aside, you’re not wrong. The top result for “Lemmy” (that isn’t about Motörhead) is for Join-Lemmy.org. I’m a tech-minded person, but when I saw this “join a server” crap instead of a front page, I decided that I’m too old and that it’s too much effort to figure out. Now imagine someone who isn’t tech-minded wants to join. They’ll fuck off even sooner than I did.
Hell, the only reason why I’m here is because I decided that Imgur isn’t a good alternative. They’re no better than reddit (i.e. no 3rd party apps). So I decided to stop being lazy and figure it the fuck out. Others might not be as motivated.
It’s ironic because bluesky is also going to have multiple servers sometime soon
… meanwhile, every account system: please enter your email
he forgot to put : /s
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Same but for journalists/writers.
Users.
☠️
An advertising budget
It really comes down to this. So many time’s I’ve discovered a cool FOSS project years after it’s existed simply because I hadn’t thought to search for it. Imagine if Linux had the advertising budget of Microsoft or Google. The “Year of the Linux Desktop” would have arrived in '99.
This aspect is one thing that makes me optimistic about the fediverse. A communication platform without ads and where the spread of information is dependent on network effects and word of mouth, means that it’s much harder for a company to force themselves in front of everyone at once using dollars.
I hate gatekeeping so much, but what I’m about to say is going to contradict that statement so much I should probably stop typing and start this post again…
Anywhoo…
If a troglodyte can’t figure out how to sign up for the fediverse, then they should stick to CorpoChat
I never got the argument that it’s hard to sign up to. I think the main issues are that people want content from media entities that may not be present or welcome - legacy media etc. This could be where threads.net fills the gap but then it sounds like they will be blocked from a lot of instances.
I have worked around it via press.coop but they don’t cover everything. I also follow more journalists directly than I did on Twitter. I don’t miss Twitter and find Mastodon more informative but I’m sure that’s because of the information I’m looking for.
When I first made an account I did it on Lemmy.ml because that’s what I had heard some people talking about and didn’t know it was one several Lemmy instances. I wasn’t aware that ml stood for marxist-leninist, and switched over to the the other I knew about .world.
I can see the average joe joining the wrong place and seeing an echo chamber or an essential empty isolated instance then forming their opinions on the fediverse around that.
I thought they were using the ml domain as they were cheap / free ? Or am I missing the joke?
From what I know they chose that specific domain because communists have a thing for Marx and Lenin (go figure). It might have been cheap/free but I’d imagine there’s other cheap free domains they decided against in favor of .ml because of the connection.
It’s also that ML was a very cheap domain because Mali (the country which the TLD belongs to) was not actively policing the use of the TLD until recently.
This entire time I was reading it as machine learning
i agree…but…no
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I just learnt of bluesky a few hours ago. Wtf do they think it will be different than any of the other corporate social media? We are nearing 20 years since the start of MySpace, do they really think thus time it’s going to be different?
A place where normies can feel at home, knowing that they won’t feel out of place not having a fursona or favourite Linux distribution and won’t be scolded for not using alt text or some inadvertent picoaggression. Also, the promise of clout.
What? The constant wave of fury porn and Linux propoganda spam isn’t what people join a social media platform for?!??!?
Have you been on bluesky? There’s lots of furries there
Also what do you have against blind people
An artificial scarcity model which gets people excited over the chance to join diet twitter.
If you go on Bluesky they will tell you. Lots of people saying that they feel isolated because there is no algorithm feeding engagement, and federation doesn’t lend itself to finding your friends from Twitter easily without one of those migration tools people were using. Then another chunk describe Mastodon users as a “HOA” because someone told them to put a CW on something.
HOA? CW?
Home Owners Association (group that implements rules for homeowners in a neighborhood like what colour you can paint your house or what you can plant in the garden), and Content Warning
Cheers
I think emulating twitter was a huge mistake for mastadon, the twitter reply structure that makes it difficult to have a long conversation with multiple people to be the main part of the post but ideal for “dunks” and outrage farming. I think the Tumblr reblog structure would have been an infinitly better choice for the more actual socialising thing fediverse is going for and a small user base that isnt producing much content and can re-circulate older posts. also it’s less image-centric allowing more posts to be stored on a server, additionally (intuitively, I haven’t thought about implementation that hard) it seems like a much more natural fit for federation.
It creates that “one big chatroom” vibe from old twitter, while Mastodon feels like a bunch of people microblogging next to each other
I do agree with you, but it’s funny because on the description for the app, it says BlueSky is for microblogging.
Yeah all of these are in theory in this “microblogging” genre of apps.
I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can’t deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.
Oh lord that would sell me on mastodon instantly if I weren’t already there.
Perhaps I should clarify: by “good posters”, I don’t mean Wendy’s epically dunking on McDonald’s and I don’t mean “night water hits different” lowest common denominator posters, just ordinary people like you and me shooting the shit. I think it’s sad Mastodon seems to have the reputation that people can’t crack a joke there.
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OK this tells me that bluesky is definitely not for me. I am happy with Mastodon. So long as the people I follow (from technology, science, research, literature, owners of cats, dogs, etc etc) remain on Mastodon, I will remain happy.
If you attempt to shitpost on Mastodon things don’t usually go very well. The vibe had to match twitter circa 2013 or else it would never have felt safe enough for the first colonizing species of memes like alf hog to develop like the first plants in a lava field
