Mastodon is great.

The only reason why it doesn't get as much traction is because it doesn't manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.

what are those?

existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub

The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.

Same here, well said. Bluesky’s not perfect, at least it’s not Twitter. I wish more people would use it though

While there has been some onboarding QOL stuff for mastodon, Bluesky still has them beat on that.

The "People" segment in the explore menu is a nice start, but it's still dependent on the users picking a server that somewhat matches their interests.

Bluesky has a lot more normies on it while mastodon is mostly early-adopter types. Mastodon, in my experience, is either very technical people (software engineers and other tech people) or very political people. Bluesky has normal people on it

I checked out threads for a day and I liked it because the algorithm wasn't jamming a bunch of outrage content down my throat but that's the only thing I can say about it. Haven't used it since then (deleted my entire meta account)

https://http.cat/status/451

because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.

"Sorry, it's literally impossible for us not to sell your data!"

man that is so cheeky of them!

Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲

Archive

But yeah, you're 100% right.

Cause the name is hard to remember.. I was trying to yesterday and the closest I could get is megatron and megalodon

In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.

Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).

Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)

In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.

BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.