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.
That’s fine, I just want either of them to actually kill twitter for good though and it just doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Mastodon. With Threads potentially joining the Fediverse, I guess who knows.
As for Threads, any threads sites or account gets instablocked on identification for me. I will not peacefully submit to Zuck the Fuck’s embrace/extend/extinguish strategy. I basically want all corporate surveillance antisocial media to die. Ruthlessly murdered, ideally, in a gruesome living vivisection.
Sure, I just meant if Threads and maybe Tumblr are serious about joining the Fediverse, maybe the whole AT Protocol that Bluesky is trying to build will fall into obscurity.
When I saw the kinds of people who were getting invites to Bluesky I knew I wanted nothing to do with Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0. As you said, it’s just going to be clout-chasing assholes all over again. I guess I prefer small town life to life in the big city, digitally speaking. (Physically I prefer the precise opposite.)
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.
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
Main positive thing I’ve heard is that it has a different vibe and culture that some might find more open and fun and sometimes even less problematic. That’s just hearsay, I’m not on there, but I’ve heard it from people I like and trust (on masto).
Yeah it’s basically old twitter before all the political drama and bots. The discover tab isn’t full of rage bait. I expect if you stop needing an invite to get in it’ll go down hill quickly.
Invites are really common on other sites now that a critical mass has been reached where people have invited everyone they know who is interested already and are like selling them, there are already accounts that farm engagement on there like “funny cat pics of the day” or something and it will indeed have some cat pics taken from wherever but the point of the account is to follow thousands of accounts to get followed back, and thereby build a following to sell off. It’s an extremely clumsy strategy but it’s being pursued often enough that you can’t just assume a bluesky account isn’t a bad actor. So if that is the threshold then it’s already been reached.
Easier sign up. On BlueSky you can just sign up for an account and go. You don’t have to worry about picking an instance or anything like on Mastodon, which can be a bit off-putting for someone not familiar with federation.
Onboarding to Mastodon is actually identical to BS/Threads now. They’ve made huge improvements. It’s a shame that most of the news media’s experience discovering Mastodon for the first time was in Oct '22 because it’s left a bit of a “techie” aura around the whole thing they’re still trying to shake off. If Mastodon was then where it is now, I don’t even think BS or Threads would try to compete.
FYI- Signing up and following people on the Mastodon app now is literally just as easy as it is on BS. All the Federation stuff is hidden unless you want to look for it. It’s very nice.
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.
I mean, even Neil Gaiman is far more active on Bluesky than he is on Mastodon, even though probably a greater proportion of his fans are on Mastodon, and he was on Mastodon well before Bluesky. So he's getting something from Bluesky that he isn't getting from Mastodon, and that's noteworthy.
Portable accounts and being able to add third party layers to your feed for moderation and sorting algorithms. At least that’s their design goal, idk if it’s actually implemented because I never got an invite after like half a year.
3rd party feeds are live. Portability is technically live but federation isn’t live outside the sandbox so you can’t make use of it yet (as in once federation is on the existing protocol will immediately allow you to migrate your profile)
This isn’t really Bluesky specific, but the artists I follow are by in large, on Bluesky and not Mastodon, and that’s pretty much the only reason I want to use it
Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.
On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.
On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.
The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.
Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.
My money’s on BS never federating at all. Mastodon Instances are communities unto themselves. The way BS is set up means an “instance” is essentially just free additional hosting for BlueSky Inc. It’s decentralized similarly to how crypto is decentralized. Of course, what else would one expect from Jack.
There’s a sandbox with federation with third party clients already live. Every piece of the system can be federated or substituted.
If somebody wanted to fork out and federate in open now they could. They aren’t doing so because it’s still work in progress, especially moderation tooling and scaling needs improvements
You can just click Follow and start following someone. You don’t have to perform a copy-paste dance to bring the username back to your instance and do the following there.
In the Mastodon app you can just click “follow”. Since BS doesn’t have a web interface at all, it’s probably safe to assume that this is not a major reason a BS user would avoid Mastodon. Since they’re not on desktop anyway.
When federation is live on the main node on bluesky there will still be some similar effects when you follow links from other servers, in that you’ll need to bring that over to your own server somehow to follow and interact.
With Mastodon when you follow another’s link you’re asked to specify your own instance, in Bluesky you’ll enter your domain based username and it will find your instance.
Also with the CDN like BGS caching servers being shared across instances you’ll be able to find more content from your home instance so it will feel more like Twitter. You can directly search for users on other servers.
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.
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.
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