Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
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Because none of those points matter to the average user.
To paraphrase my opinion from back then:
- Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
- customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
- better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
- stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
- many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods
What is HOA?
Home Owners Association a group or people that “polices” neighbors and has a hisyory of doing shady things. But he’s referring to the actitude of “coming outta nowhere to tell you what to do” they have in common.
What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.
Yeah, turns out weird, hostile, anti-social nerds are weird, hostile, and anti-social, and they probably ruined our best shot at freeing the web from VC backed corporate control of communication.
Personally, I’m excited there’s a decentralized option that’s super popular. Yes, relatively very few run their own PDS, but if the main bsky instance becomes a problem for anyone, people can easily migrate.
It’s not just data ownership either; The AT protocol supports community-built algorithms, relays, and app views.
I wouldn’t say it’s truly decentralised in its current state.
The whole thing’s just a scam to off-load data storage costs to super-users. It’s sad that people are excited about it.
Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)
When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.
Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.
I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.
At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)
I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.
In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.
I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.
IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.
The “just pick an instance!” and “my instance shut down” thing is a core pain point here.
BlueSky is corporately run, and it’s semi-centealized. This is bad for the internet, but it’s good for the user. At least on the surface. And that’s what users care about. It provides a sense of stability, and an umspoken promise that if anything happens, it’s the company’s fault, and the company’s problem.
The fediverse is run by hobbiests. You join some hobbiest’s forum or microblog, it connects to a bunch of other hobbiest’s forums or microblogs, and if things break, oh well, it’s just a hobby! And if that hobby becomes stressful for the hobbiest, they just abandon the hobby.
Leaving the users holding the bag.
The fediverse is unstable as an end user, because, as it’s currently structured, it’s not really designed to have end users. It’s designed to have hobbiest tinkerers. It’s right in the oft repeated motto of tne of the fediverse: users should own their data!
But who owns the data in the fediverse? Who actually controls it?
Server admins.
You own your data by self-hosting.
Like a giant computer nerd.
I’ve got an idea as to why.
I went to mastodon.social and see a Linux meme, some heavy political commentary, and a bunch of posts about mastodon being better than Twitter.
I then went to bluesky.app and see some political riffing, cute animals, a comic, some jokes, a company, and even Don Lemon.
The average person checking them both out for the first time, mastodon is nerd shit and Bluesky is normal shit.
I’ve tried to stick with mastodon for a while and after using it for months, your description of checking it out is STILL what my feeds look like. That’s all there seems to be on Mastodon.
Feels like deciding in 2010 between Twitter and Reddit in some ways…
You have to understand we are not normal users. Anyone even remotely interested in federated software are not normal users.
Bluesky may not have 57 third party apps and that’s why people are flocking to it. It’s easy. The signup process through the app involved no selecting of servers, no understanding of what it actually is under the hood, and users are greeted by a default algorithm that feels very much like old Twitter before Musk.
Basically, regular users do not care about the fediverse and just want a competent and polished app and site experience.
At least for Japanese users, they want to see content they love from creators relevant to them. Creators = illustrator, comic artist, photographer, cosplayer, writer, etc.
Creators want a stable platform that allows them to widen their reach and potentially making more money.
Mastodon at the moment are tend to be hostile against creators that wants to monetize their work. Not to forget, the creator you want to follow are on defederated or blocks your instance for random admin drama.
But hey, at least fediverse software like Misskey actually trying to serve these community. Like allowing community ads (like promoting indie comics, vtuber, or social event) and trying to be stable by resolving any potential instance problem together with zero drama. Misskey community also often have tendency to “decoupling from Western tech supremacy”
Because it pretends to be different to the centralised corporate social media platforms, whilst giving the cohesive experience of a centralised platform
Best answer yet IMO. The cohesive experience is essential to the branding, and low threshold for entry.
Because centralized services are easier to use.
This exactly. I didn’t join Lemmy for a long time, because I would search for “Lemmy”, get confused when I see a page asking me to “pick an instance” instead of seeing a front page, and then leave because I thought that they were all independent from each other.
It wasn’t until reddit killed my favorite app that I finally decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
I’m running my own PDS on the AT Protocol 🤷♂️
because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.
bsky also had a bunch of marginalised people - including trans people - as early adopters that helped shape their views on moderation.
because bsky actually listened to their users and implemented features they asked for unlike mastodon who attacked migrators during the first twitter migration.
The issue I have with this narrative is that the features migrators wanted already existed in the Fediverse, on Misskey, Friendica, Pleroma, Akkoma, etc. If anyone wanted to actually listen to those of us trying to point them to those options, things might have been a little different. But those voices were drowned out by the Mastodon circle jerk, and people didn’t actually grok the whole federation thing well enough to understand that they could follow the same people from any of the different softwareseseses.
The fediverse isn’t Mastodon, and we all do it a huge disservice by continuing to talk about it as if it were, even as we use a different fediverse platform.
It’s shiny, they advertise, put in a money to spread the word. And the onboarding process probably is way easier?! Also back when Mastodon was in the media, it wasn’t yet the right time. Now, especially with Musk, it is. And the attention is on Bluesky since that is newer and what’s hyped right now.
install mastodon
Pick an instance
Hit up all
giant penis
That’s why. That’s the reason.
but you could review the instance beforehand…
Is Jimbo Normalman going to review the instance beforehand? Lmao.
Are you talking about a Bhutan instance lmao!
Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.
I’m dabbling in Bluesky atm. Having run my own Masto server for over a year at this point. Here’s things I’ve found that Bluesky does just plain better - mostly cause it’s not beholden to the whims of the ActivityPub protocol.
- Shows me all replies to any post I happen to come across.
- Lets me see all posts about things I happen to search/look for, including hashtags.
- I don’t have to worry about being unable to see content I haven’t personally blocked (not so much of an issue on a small/single server like mine though).
- I can repost things (not actually too bothered with this one but many people want it).
- I can set per post reply permissions to a very granular level (no-one, mentioned, followers, specific followers)
- It handles video in a way that works i.e. I can post them, and people can watch them with minimal buffering/waiting.
- Gives me access to community built collections/algorithms that expose the content I want to see.
- It defaults to providing an additional feed driven by what the people I’m following are liking/interacting with.
- Finally, a big one for new users, it provided a default feed of content when I first logged in so that I had something to look at.
The first two are huge on a small/single user server. By default we get nothing, following a single account will get us the content of just that account and the replies that they happen to reply to. A post may get 200 replies, but unless I go looking on the original server I will see a fraction of that. Technical solutions exist to help with this but the Fediverse’s penchant for privacy and control (quite rightly) limits the effectiveness (Fedifetcher, GetMoarFedi).
3 is something most people won’t think about. But if they become aware they’re not seeing something they thought they’d be able to they then have to deep dive into who’s defederating who and why.
Most all the other points just make the whole thing a much more seamless experience for your average user. Bootstrapping a list of people to follow on a small server is hard (I’d absolutely recommend creating a Fediverse account somewhere large first to build up some sort of list before migrating)
Because BlueSky will get them more engagement than Mastodon.
