Why, oh, why, Bluesky and not Mastodon
The budget for Mastodon gGmbH is measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and Bluesky’s is much more than that.
Yet, Bluesky didn’t even support video posts until two weeks ago. Many other highly requested features are still missing. To what extent does the success of each platform come down to money? What did Bluesky do with a larger budget to get an edge?
My recollection is that they advertised and got Important People™ to post there as part of their invite-only beta. Don’t quote me on this, but I believe they paid some of these people to create accounts and post there. Not sure if that was a rumor or not.
Because people, even leftists, want the bad company to be replaced by a good company.
Why replace horrible company with bad company run by literally THE guy that let the prior company become horrible instead of replacing it with good non-profit network?
FOMO. More celebrities are on Bluesky than Mastodon and people don’t care enough about open protocols and so forth to forego that. If Taylor Swift was only on some Fediverse-enabled platform and nothing else, people would come here in droves. Taylor Swift does not post on Mastodon so people don’t want an account here. Replace Taylor Swift for anyone of any sort of popularity and ask the same questions.
I do wonder who the most famous person in the world is that exclusively posts on a Fediverse-platform. It could very well be Eugen Rochko, who probably has about a 0.05% name recognition throughout the world.
Mastodon has serious UX problems that even other federated networks don’t have. I’m pretty well tech literate and love Lemmy, for instance, but I just couldn’t ever get Mastodon to stick for me, like it just didn’t have the right feel and wasn’t fun to use. And if it’s not working for me then it’s never going to take off with a more general audience.
Bluesky is a lot better. It still has some issues that I feel keep it from fully replacing Twitter, especially Twitter before Elon screwed it up. But it does manage to keep me checking it, even though it’s probably only once or twice a week max.
I think one of the biggest reasons is that the Fediverse is often a pain to get into and sometimes a pain to use.
Bluesky and Threads “just work.”
Some people say it’s marketing and in Threads’ case I can believe it, but I haven’t seen any example of large marketing campaign by Bluesky.
I wonder whether it was the right decision to not federate with Threads.
On the one hand, yes, they would have caused a lot of problematic content, but on the other hand, it would have meant a lot of new users, and that would have livened up the place a bit. I guess.
Maybe we could do a switch in the user profile for Lemmy where it says “show Thread posts in All posts”. Or something.
How is Bluesky easier to use when it’s literally also federated? And you can just create an account on any Mastodon instance like mastodon.world or mastodon.social and start using it.
That’s inaccurate and reductive. ATproto and ActivityPub do not federate the same way, and how they work greatly affects how users interact with the entire ecosystem.
On Mastodon, pick the wrong instance and there’s content you’ll never see, migration isn’t complete, discovery is so bad they started a new initiative to try fixing it, instances have their own cultures, and so on.
Bluesky has issues, some I’d consider critical, but they’re not directly user-facing for the most part. Make an account, you get the same experience as everyone else.
edit: Sorry, I have this issue where I try to be concise, yet feel like I end up being rude. I get your confusion, but they’re quite different. Hopefully this helped; I can elaborate if you want.
It may be easier because Bluesky already made the choice for you, you don’t need to pick an instance, the default is Bluesky Social and that’s it, if you want a different one you can search it or make one. It removes that tiny mental block of having to commit to a server you don’t know if you will like.
Because outside of the Fediverse, literally no one has heard of Mastodon. No one has heard of the Fediverse either.
Mastodon has more users than Bluesky. (I fear it won’t stay like that for a long time anymore though as Bluesky has a bigger growth rate.)
All those people and its never managed to show me anything I felt was worthy of following.
Sadly, Mastodon had its shot during the pandemic and blew it. The non-tech savvy didn’t understand how federation worked and they marketed themselves very poorly.
Because Mastodon needs a reliable instance with a catchy domain name. Maybe even the slightest bit of advertising.
Someone reputable could make a real Twitter competitor for about $2m a year these days.
I’d say Mozilla, but they just took all their social media funding away and threw it at AI. Genius.
I’d say Mozilla, but they just took all their social media funding away and threw it at AI.
Nobody was using their instance from what I heard. So a bit of a wasted effort.
What sort of money are they throwing at AI? I only know about the sidebar and that’s basically just a tab to a website of your choosing. Couldn’t have been expensive.