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
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
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 enthused
Features-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^[or subdomain]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub’s @actor.
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.
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.
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.
Tho I agree with all the comments I have to say the general vibe of bluesky is more playful and fun compared to mastadon, perhaps its just my bias. But just like lemmy generally feels like a nice place to be so does bluesky- the vibe feels inviting.
I’ve got an account on Bluesky and I’m not sure if I agree. Like 90% of the posts I’ve seen on there are about Bluesky itself, there wasn’t really anything beyond that.
I think the issue is that there's a slow trickle of people who have just gotten in and go "Wow I just got in, has anyone got any tips?"
Find one or more feeds you like and pin them. I use the newly created For You feed (which algorithmically puts stuff there it thinks you will like) and a couple of topical feeds that are specific to my interests. I think it's great. Way more content that I care about than there ever was on twitter, and way way more engagement between folks.
I'm a big proponent of Mastodon/Firefish in general, but while they win in volume, Bluesky is already pulling ahead for me in signal to noise ratio. (I think that's very subjective to what things interest you, so YMMV.)
My instance is great, although I wish we would switch to glitch-soc so we could have instance-only visibility on posts. I don’t really see much inter-instance drama and I generally don’t get harassed by people who think I need to post a certain way (maybe because I’ve been on Masto since 2018 and they have been on less than a year?)
But those are still legitimate problems for a lot of people.
Are you referring to Jack Dorsey? He’s not the owner, he just gave them grant money in the beginning. It’s a non-profit so technically no individual “owns” it.
“Prior to the seed round, Bluesky’s website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by Graber and other Bluesky employees.[33] Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp.”
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