I’ve been reading that BlueSky has reached critical mass and is snowballing well at the moment. I suspect it has drawn people away from the fedi and back into the loving embrace of venture capitalists.
I’ve been reading that BlueSky has reached critical mass and is snowballing well at the moment. I suspect it has drawn people away from the fedi and back into the loving embrace of venture capitalists.
I used to be a staunch mastodon fanboy, but honestly I’m starting to lean towards Bluesky nowadays.
Sure there’s only one big company controlling all the instances, but their federation system has solved a lot of the pain points that have been plagueing Mastodon. I can actually follow artists on it without having to deal with mastodon.art.
And hey, it’s an easy to use social media to use for the “normies” rather that the techie Mastodon.
What makes mastodon techie?
You have to have technical knowledge and understanding, both to create an account and work around the rough edges.
How so? Creating an account is like any other sign up? Everyone has an @username@server like email. There’s nor much else to care about in order to use it.
There’s the whole “instances” thing which, while not that confusing, is still a barrier to entry. You could make an account on mastodon.social, but there’s a vocal group out there that says you should NEVER do that and pick an instance that is good (without any good tooling for finding out what a “good” instance is). The benefits of Mastodon over Twitter or Bluesky aren’t as obvious either to non-technical people, so I can imagine people see it like Arch Linux or something. It’s something that’s good for the people that understand it, but not useful for those that don’t.
You also need to figure out how to get content from another instance into yours, which is not really that intuitive. If I give you a link to a Mastodon post, you need to know to go back to your own instance and paste it into the search bar. That’s not intuitive at all.
And of course there’s experiences people have had with “bad” instances that travel through word of mouth. A lot of furries are reluctant to try Mastodon because a big furry instance exploded a while back, I think.