Could bluesky have won over Mastodon because of the fediverse barrier where people doesn’t know which server to choose?
Now someone have to write a server to federate to Bluesky, if for nothing more, as a reality check.
Bridgy Fed exists to act as a bridge between AP and ATProto/blue sky if you want to use ATProto from Mastodon. Sadly, though, the bluesky user has to also follow the bridge for you to be able to see their posts from mastodon.
That’s exactly it. People are bad at tech and do not understand it. If you even give them an additional option, this may confuse a tremendous amount of people enough to simply lose interest.
That’s the thing, though. Bluesky gives you that option, too. And you could always just sign up with the one big official Mastodon server.
IIRC, they got hammered with new users back when Mastodon was more popular, and they couldn’t keep up (since every server is run on a shoestring). So, they put s moratorium on new accounts, forcing people onto other instances. That might’ve been what hurt adoption.
Not really. Bluesky has a server option, but it’s filled with their main instance by default and you can just ignore it.
Mastodon, on the other hand, doesn’t have a single entry point for registrations. Everything is more convoluted for the layperson.
I use both. I’ve been on Mastodon for the better part of a year and only actively tried Bluesky the last couple months. My Bluesky feed is thriving, whereas Mastodon not so much. IMO this is due to Mastodon is missing the major quality of life features of Bluesky.
- Add lists
- Subscribable block lists
- Custom subscribable topic feeds
- Optional recommendation engine
These things make Bluesky very easy to get started with and more powerful even than Xitter was. It’s simply a better product if you have any requirements other than federation. Getting a good feed up and running doesn’t take more than an hour or two. Mastodon is a lot more work.
The “starter packs” of Bsky is good, too. (Maybe that’s your ‘add lists’ though.)
I go over there and search for stuff, and the page is always broken. It’s been like that for weeks. You only get one page of results, and then you get an error. The infinite scroll doesn’t work.
There is starter packs now but not many have been made and I forgot the website that you find them.
Yeah, not many, only 184,281 have been made
I think it was mostly that Mastodon wouldn’t send referer headers.
So when people look at where their traffic comes from, 50% would be unknown, 20% would be Twitter, 10% would be Bluesky, and most importantly, Mastodon would never show on that report.
(Numbers made up and inaccurate.)
Bluesky is being run by a funded professional startup team and is aimed at the masses. Mastodon is run by activists and software devs and brings in other like minded folks.
Most importantly, Mastodon doesn’t have the funding. It always astounds me how people miss that part.
Money lets you fix a lot of problems. Not all. But many.
Of course, it doesn’t mean they’ll succeed. Google+ had lots of money, too.
Ugh, Google+ was so much better than Facebook. The whole circles concept was a game changer for social media that no one else has really adopted in a meaningful way. Half the reason millennials began to leave Facebook was not wanting their parents seeing what they’re posting, so being able to decide which group can see a particular post was an awesome idea.
Sadly it just never got the adoption
Bluesky has an advertising budget. Bluesky has an entire team just working on User Interface.
The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.
“It’s not my job to contribute to a community project” is just another way to say “it’s not my job to make the world a better place.”
The fact that people are so lazy that they keep going for the corporate-sure-to-enshittify options shows how little people actually care about escaping corporate control of their lives.
It’s not that deep.
People want to go where other people are. A tiny minority of them are even aware of the things that are influencing your decisions. Not a single moment is spent thinking about whether X or Y is more ‘corporately controlled’ before deciding to join a new platform.
It’s generally easier for the layperson to pay a gym membership than it is to have the upfront cost of a barbell set and coordinating a schedule with their neighbor who owns a treadmill.
I don’t want to sound too pro-corporate, I just don’t want to fault others when they fall for the veneer of a “cohesive product.” It takes a lot of work to organize a community project and why it’s so special when they do come together.
-
That was part of the reason. I tried explaining Pixelfed to my photographer dad and he completely lost interest when I mentioned instances and equated them to e-mail providers. Non-technical people don’t like having to understand a technical aspect, and the nature of federation can’t be avoided.
-
Keep in mind that these are the people who stayed on Twitter after it was infested by the musk. They’re leaving because it’s turned into a dogshit service, not because of any kind of moral stance. They won’t choose one service over another because it’s libre or decentralized or community-operated. They’ll flock to one that has a low entry barrier and high population.
-
Speaking of which: Bluesky is where the people are. The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
We should just point normal people to the biggest instance and never mention anything until they’re settled in.
It is the most viable strategy, but we did that with lemmy.world and now a third of the fediverse is screeching about censorship on the largest instance and directly shitting on LW users.
The merits of a social media provider are worthless if it has a fraction of the population of a direct competitor.
No they aren’t, the network effect isn’t some magical all powerful force of nature that you cannot resist.
We can choose to join a community that is small and help grow it, frankly if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways which isn’t to say that the fediverse doesn’t need to work on becoming way more accessible and friendly to the average person.
and help grow it
You grossly overestimate the average social media user’s willingness to make an effort to create a Thing when that same Thing already exists in a usable state under a different name; and yes, for the purpose of having a Twitter-like microblog, Mastodon and Bluesky are identical.
if people aren’t able to grapple with that I don’t think they are ready to come here anyways
And they didn’t. It continues happening in real time, and the value gap between Mastodon and Bluesky, from the average social media user’s perspective, continues to grow. Thinking that a handful of libre-minded people can change that is wishful thinking bordering on delusion.
I think that’s a good part of it, to be honest. Plus I think also helps that Bluesky’s handles look visually less confusing and unusual than the conventional double @ sign for the fediverse
.bsky.social vs @user@bsky.social
Plus other things like having starter packs
Who’s now left Bluesky which is probably for the better given his views on a lot of things
