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’m sticking to Mastodon because I don’t want to give into yet another corporate platform to eventually end up with the same results as Twitter and Reddit. Most people are on Twitter/Reddit/Bluesky? Who cares? Enough people are on Mastodon and Lemmy.
I agree. There’s already more people here than any of the forums I lived on back in the 00s.
BlueSky already annoys me because someone took my name for an inactive account. It’s why I chose Mastodon over BlueSky initially.
With that said, Mastodon has several glaring issues:
- Federation, in general, solves a problem that very few people have. People don’t want to pick an app or an instance out of dozens. They want the prescribed experience, and then they want to tailor to their preferences.
- It’s dead. There is interaction, but if you set up an account, follow some people, reply to some stuff, you’ll probably get maybe 1-2 followers? The interaction seems stuck at a few people.
- There are a lot of bots, which in itself can be useful, but when several are there to maintain archives of Twitter accounts onto Mastodon it just adds to the deadness.
- It doesn’t offer anything new or interesting over BlueSky or Twitter. It’s just a clone.
- Humour hasn’t really made it’s way onto Mastodon. It’s all very serious stuff, and many people like social media to look at dumb shit.
With that said, BlueSky is growing, but it’s still a minnow.
No.
Communication/Social Media isn’t for corporations to do what they want with it, or to manipulate their users. It needs a neutral, open platform. That means open source servers and clients and protocols.
I find it worrying how so many people noticed the decline of Twitter happening live and now continue to move to the next corporate, closed-down platform. Until the next time, I guess…
Used Mastodon for two days. Not a great platform imo. Been using Bluesky for a few months and having a decent time, but sometimes it’s hard getting fed the content I want (not sure if it exists in general there).
Also have been a decently heavy Twitter user since 2013 ish
I have a mastodon account, but using it feels like shouting into the void so I don’t post much.
Shouting into the void is how most platforms are tbh.
In order of bad to good:
Tumblr:
Twitter: (doesn’t scale well but there are a ton more that have 0)
Pinterest: I made 1 post and it got 0 likes.
YouTube: pretty good actually
Reddit: the best, can’t include image bc I deleted my account but made a meme and it got ~3,000 upvotes
I feel like I used to have that same feeling too, and I think that may be the wrong mindset to have about how to use it. I think it’s almost like a subconscious expectation that corporate social media has trained into us, which has been draining our drive for healthy interactions online.
I’m still mostly a lurker on Mastodon, but I’m trying to see the platform as more of an open way to broadcast yourself to certain audiences. I’m trying to realize it’s potential in how it can allow healthy, self-perpetuating interactions in a way that’s kind of different from the types of interactions you get from content aggregators.
I’ve noticed that it kind of builds on itself over time, if you continue to use it and continue to browse the explore feeds and stuff like that. Anyway, maybe don’t give up on it just yet?
I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, but when the argument is that it’s not empty because “you’re not using it right” the battle is kinda already lost.
Fundamentally, I don’t disagree, but it’s definitely a platform issue rather than a user issue.
How might it be improved, in your opinion?
Neither, I never used Twitter in the first place so I didn’t need a Twitter alternative.
I think the Lemmy/Reddit style of posts and comments is much more intuitive and makes for easier engagement than the Twitter style of rolling status updates.Along this line of thinking, I use Lemmy and Mastodon as complementary rather than competing, but not in the way people want/use X/Bluesky. Lemmy (reddit) is great for the use as you outline, Mastodon (and Pixelfed) supply a visual experience if you make it work that way and don’t expect/want an X like experience (so think more Instagram). Lemmy lacks multireddits which could solve some of this Mastodon use case, on reddit I have a multireddit named “Gallery” which combines a dozen picture-only subreddits.
One can follow hashtags like
#photographyor#catsofmastodon, discover like-minded profiles who only post pictures and minimal talk/chatter (a lot of actual skilled photographers are present) and follow those profiles. It provides an experience that rounds out Lemmy, but I do admit I would love a “gallery” like view in the apps to streamline the hashtag viewing (Pixelfed does this specifically, but people are spread all over the planet - Mastodon proper pulls in federated data easier, IMHO)
I gave Mastodon a couple of tries but I don’t think I lasted more than a few days in either instance. I’m just really not into that style of social media, regardless of who the provider of the service is. I do not understand the point of it nor how to “correctly” interact with it.
I also found Mastodon to be extremely confusing and so has every person that I have directed to it. Mastodon’s website and docs do a very poor job explaining how it works to people who are not already in-the-know about federated services. Lemmy was a bit confusing too but I had a much easier time grasping it - although that could be because I have more experience with Reddit-styled websites.
I wish it all the best because it seems like people are just making moves to other VC-owned, private, enshittified platforms that will abuse/exploit their users. I want Mastodon to succeed but often feel like it doesn’t doing much to help its own case.
No and I don’t have any intentions to. It being a company means it has or it will have ads, and I have no interest in seeing more ads that I already have to.
No. I don’t trust another corporate-owned platform, and I don’t trust the way they pay lip service to federation while still making everything dependent on one central server they control.
Obviously, the answer is no, because nearly nobody from Bluesky is checking this.
Bsky has actual people from twitter I wanted to follow that never bothered with mastodon
This is it for me. I don’t ever post on Twitte/Mastodon/Bluesky, it’s entirely read only for me, and the feeds I want to follow are finally starting to migrate to Bluesky. They never considered Mastadon.
This, plus bsky seems to have a more active sports culture compared to mastodon so, although I’ve been in mastodon for a couple years, I’m already kind of enjoying bsky more.
Caveat: I’ve literally only been on bsky for less than a week so the activity over there could absolutely be temporary, we’ll see.
I refuse to support a corporate platform, whilst also adding nothing new to the agenda as well to make me want to go on Bluesky, so therefore I’m sticking with Mastodon/Fedi atm. Much more ethical that way.
Also much more fun and positive too with liked minded people on there too (except the Israel/Palestine stuff, which seems to be super divisive for some odd reasons in which it really shouldn’t be controversial at all but I digress tbh)
Also a way to say “fuck you” to Jack Dorsey too, who has ruined the internet, thanks to him tbh lol despite not being part of the Bluesky board anymore.
Once in a blue moon I remember that I have a Mastodon account. And I use it mostly because of the cross-compatibility with other Fediverse applications, something that Bluesky lacks.
I suspect it has drawn people away from the fedi and back into the loving embrace of venture capitalists.
I think so, too. Even people who understand what federation is and why it’s good are still affected by network effect; “it’s federated” might weight a lot for them, but it is not a perfect shield.
Even though there is some network effect just in terms of there being much less content on the threadiverse than Reddit, I do feel like this is something we’re somewhat shielded from. For the most part, we’re not here to follow specific people: my friends aren’t on Lemmy/Mbin, or maybe they are, I don’t actually know or care. I have a Mastodon, but a lot of the people I’d theoretically be interested to follow are still on Twitter, or BlueSky, or Threads or something. It’s not enough of a pull factor to make me join any of those, but it’s probably why I barely use Mastodon.
Instead of “shielded” I think that a more accurate word would be that we have a “buffer”. The network effect still applies to us, as much as it does in the microblogging side of the Fediverse; it’s just indirectly (more people → more content → more people), in a way that content produced here in the past still might attract users in the future.
At least bluesky has bridges
I’m using Masto a few times a day and I generally like it. I get a good mix of news and pictures. I joined after Twitter became X.
I’m not on Bsky but frankly reading the comments in this thread makes me consider it
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.
