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If you want microblogging social media just use mastodon (or one of it's forks). Even if Bluesky is decent now, it's owned by venture capital, so it's only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
I do like Mastodon as a platform, but it seems nobody really bothers to actually use it for communication. Just drop-posting updates on things with zero replies.
Maybe since it doesn't have all the addiction patterns or algos like other apps do? I'm really not sure.
I was considering going through the hassle of setting up a Mastodon server for me and my family and friends only but... something tells me I'd run into the same problem lol.
...People just seem too busy and tired and scattered on 15 different incompatible social apps and geographic locations to bother with each other anymore. :(
I don't know, I've been on mastodon for like 8 years now and have never had any problem connecting with other people.
I only use it sporadically, but when I do, I often write replies and get replies. I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more). I'm not convinced the reply rate is significantly lower than BS or twitter..
Re: your last comment: for sure. To me that's another bonus of fediverse, e.g. since mastodon is at least partially able to interact with Lemmy and other fediverse apps, and that will presumably improve over time, eventually you will be able to do at lot of cross-app interaction from one place.
I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more).
"This game becomes fun after 51st boss" energy.
Mastodon is not a viable alternative if you actually want to follow people. I tried to use it multiple times but almost nobody I care about is there. I’d love for Mastodon to be more popular but it just isn’t.
Sure. Right now, everyone has to make a trade-off between accepting a smaller network and engaging with corporate garbage designed to create rage and clicks. Personally I'm happy to sit on the smaller network and contribute a bit and wait for it to build naturally. That's why I'm here on Lemmy too.
My entire point is that this isn't how it works for me. I use these platforms to keep up with personalities and organisations I care about. Almost none of those are on Mastodon, so it's just straight-up useless to me. If Bluesky suddenly disappeared and Mastodon stayed exactly the same I wouldn't switch, I'd just use neither.
It's true that many mainstream accounts are not on mastodon but much of that can be remedied by following Threads and Flipboard accounts. Plus, you avoid the ads.
True, I haven't really given Mastodon a shot since it started to be able to federate with Threads and that can definitely help! But that move was also controversial on its own. I'm not sure whether my instance even federates with Threads but of course you can always move or make your own.
I wouldn't really call the accounts I follow mainstream. It's leftists, leftist YouTubers, queer and especially trans people. And those mostly found a home on Bluesky especially after Meta changed their policy and started to allow a lot of questionable things like saying queer people are mentally ill. Which also made me delete my Instagram account, so it's not like I don't have any principles. Although to be fair I was never particularly active there to begin with.
Mastodon has many queer and trans people. There are entire instances. But they might not be your particular people.
But then wouldn't you just use X instead of Bluesky?
Do you really need me to tell you why I’m not using the nazi pedophile transphobia platform?
Plus, most people I used to follow there have moved over to Bluesky a long time ago. I would’ve preferred it if everyone moved to Mastodon instead but for now Bluesky is at least acceptable.
So I guess the worry (echoed in this thread as well) is that Bluesky could become the same type of platform, given the people and investors behind it. Only time will tell
Yes, and I totally share that concern. But for now, Bluesky is pretty good. And if it gets enshittified we'll hopefully have an easier time convincing people to move to Mastodon.
It’s not quite as unhinged as Twitter, but it’s still corporate-owned social media run by some very questionable people. It also had a huge bot problem; when I deleted my account it had ~300 bot followers (and like 10 real ones). That was a bit over a year ago, so it might’ve improved by now, but I don’t have high hopes
Last time I tried Bluesky was the start of this year, with a week had like 20 bot accounts following me, maybe 1 real person
OP If you want the best of both worlds try WAFRN. It's both ATProto (bluesky) and activitypub (mastodon, etc) so you can engage with both communities. It also has some pretty robust blocking features for removing content you don't want to see.
There's a few problems with Bluesky if you're looking for a platform that won't eventually turn to shit.
- The platform is not meaningfully decentralized. With Bluesky directing its future, they have the power to do whatever they want with it, including attempting to monetize and clamp down on access.
- Because of point 1 above, Bluesky is able to easily censor users.
- To fix points 1 & 2 above you have to run the full stack: a PDS (~$5/month), relay (~$30/month), and AppView (~$300/month), which is prohibitively expensive for most people.
Hosting your own mastodon instance, which cannot be easily blanket-censored costs ~$5 bucks a month.
If a system is the outcome it produces, Mastodon is a platform for the people, Bluesky a platform for large orgs.
And mastodon should be for official/gov instances, they shouldn't rely on some techbros stuffs. And people following those would make the jump, media are doing it to see Trump daily bullshit, so they would for other, and it would be easier because it's federated not like Trump Social
Eventually turn to shit means it could still be good for like a decade.
True! But personally I'm okay with not contributing to the next facebook/Zucc or Twitter/Elmo. Long-term it's in our best interest to build on platforms that serve us, not their creators, even if it takes them 10 years to slowly pull the rug from underneath us.
What about blacksky? Its completely independent afaik?
Blacksky is an option. But the point about the platform not being meaningfully decentralized still stands. Your current options with [*]sky are equivalent to only having the option of using either mastodon.social or mstdn.jp, the two biggest mastodon social platforms.
On the Mastodon side, you have the option of nearly 9k servers to choose from.
It is not as good anymore as it used to be. The annoying kind of leftists abandoned Mastodon for BlueSky, some blocklists are done in absolute bad faith ("anti-pedophile" blocklist are just pro-trans activists, others are cancel culture bullshit). However, it's still million times better than Elon's nazi bar (seriously, everyone should just boycott the nazi bar, it now wants me to "age verify" to access porn, which was its last saving grace)
Yeah wouldn't touch whatever that Trump Bootlicker wanna be tech specialist loser freak layed upon even if he threatened me with a shank.
If you want to interact with normal people, it’s the least-bad game in town. You might even find some established journalists, musicians, authors and such.
Are those normal people, though?
Mostly not, but there are normal people among them. In the fediverse, it’s mostly those who feel that they have no place anywhere else. (Occasionally a curious normie makes an account. You see vast swathes of these accounts which were last logged into 2 1/2 years ago while they engage and build clout somewhere where there are others like them.)
We need to learn from past mistakes.
When Jeff Bezos buys bluesky in 2035 and change its name to BlueDildo what?
Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes (most recently: platner glazing up til he finally dropped.) more robust blocking then twitter, and lets you subscribe to lists of shitters to block. I have had issues with bots but they've been fairly easy to spot, and largely resolved when I subscribed to a list that simply blocks everyone who follows 10k+ people.
Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes
Yep. Twotter is ranting Nazis, BS is virtue signalling lefties.
*libs. They are not leftists other than idpol lol.
America has a different definition of 'liberal' though
America has a different definition of leftism, but I'm no American and come from a country with actual leftist movements.
Pretty sure the Nazis at Twitter do just as much virtue signalling. Every play in the right wing playbook these days is to pretend to care about a value and then do nothing for, or the opposite of, it.
If following official brand accounts is important to you, BlueSky will be better than Mastodon or other ActivityPub services.
Are there right-wing/nazi/fascist rage baiters on the platform? yes. But you can effectively wall them off. BlueSky has good community moderation tools (make sure you actually look at who is maintaining a block list and the people included in it, because block lists can be created in bad faith). User-level blocking just works: the person you blocked can't see you, at all, so they're not posting replies to you that everyone but you can see. Quote-posting is well controlled: you can detach someone else's quote from your original post. And you can mute/hide individual replies to your posts.
Why would you use another privately owned platform that's likely to enshittify?
I use it regularly and enjoy it, especially in the food, comedy, gaming, and programming communities. If you give it a go I highly recommend trying the “For You” feed. You pin it to your list of feeds, and it produces such shockingly relevant content. It definitely has a mixture of folks on it though, despite that people claim it’s one group on one platform and another group on Bsky.
I actually find the mixture of takes to not be all that different from Lemmy, just less pro-Chinese posts, and maybe even more anti-AI stances than I’ve seen around here.
If you want to hide from politics though, “For You” can definitely be a bit of a bubble. Being a left or right swipe away from escaping your bubble is a nice compromise imo.
I only just started dabbling in Bluesky. I like that your username is federated, which meant I'm using Bluesky without a Bluesky account, since I signed up elsewhere first.
It's definitely a lot more popular than Masto, et al, which isn't always a good thing. Sure there's all the famous people, but it makes it harder to find real people to follow. Or at least for me.
I have enjoyed the For You tab though.
It's fine but discovery still sucks and genrally it's very low effort. I'd recommend spending the first few hours finding the right profiles to follow as the general post quality is very low but there are gems worth finding.
If you're signing up for ATproto, I'd avoid Bsky and go for Blacksky instead. Although on Blacksky, the two public PDSes you can pick are cryptoanarchy.network and myatproto.social.
Also, Bsky has been trying to push ID lately while Blacksky isn't yet, but there's the chance that Bsky corporate could start to get hostile against Blacksky and other third parties and start to block them at some point.
The only way anyone saw any post was for me to hijack another person's feed. Otherwise, no engagement on anything
I like BlueSky, and it's nowhere near as unhinged as Twitter.
As with how Twitter used to be, it's just a question of curatung your feed. If someone is an asshole you block them and move on.
The key difference is that you can choose to have a feed of only those you follow, and that's what you actually get, not algorithm-driven nonsense.
Just go to Mastodon for a twitter like micro blogging experience.
I left Twitter shortly after Elon bought it so I can't offer a comparison.
About the only thing I looked at on Bluesky was a feed from my home town. BS is great for local news and events. The only thing better is my collection of rss feeds. I closed my account before they started with the identity verification bs. Bluesky is largely vibe-coded if that is an issue for you.
Don’t know got ban from there saying that their algorithm push AI art as art and that AI art is not protected by author’s rights so you could copy-paste everything on some account.
I'd say if you're looking for a microblogging site, the best experience is following Bluesky accounts via bridgy from mastodon or piefed or misskey or something. Most accounts don't bridge, so you mostly avoid getting dragged into things, but the big accounts do so you can mostly follow what's going on.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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