154 points

It’ll take a while, but I do believe we’re watching the downfall of Twitter.

And I suspect, now that Bluesky is the clear successor to Twitter, the process will only accelerate.

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Give it 6 months and then musky’s well funded administration will find a way to make bluesky feel the legal crunch

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9 points

They can just shift countries. 32% of Bluesky users are from Brazil, ~ 7% from Japan, ~ 4% from the UK and 2% from Germany.

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4 points

Likely there will be an exodus of web services that don’t want to trade the further loss of Article 230 and the requirement of Christofascist cemsorship for even less taxes and zero worker protections.

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9 points

Truth social hasn’t failed yet, it could lose money and it would just be a propaganda service that costs money instead of making money.

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11 points
*

It’s not going to have funding bribing problems until Trump is out of office.

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20 points

Does Musk actually care about Twitter any more?

It’s served its purpose. It won the election for Trump. Musk will probably just focus on being Trump’s puppy and let Twitter slowly die out.

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19 points

Ok, can we puh-leese stop talking about corporate media siloses on the fediverse? I keep seeing Elon’s stupid mug plastered all over the media, can Lemmy be the exception, pretty please?

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5 points

We can stop talking about after we’ve destroyed it

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2 points

It’s quite ironic that for a lot of people “destroying twitter” means spending half a day there, finding rage-inducing tweets and sharing them on other social media sites just so they can enjoy the free traffic and engagement. It would be nice if we could, you know, ignore it and let it die.

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3 points

The Switzerland approach isn’t going to work. It’s datacenters must be rendered inoperable and disconnected from the grid and its billionaires made to flee to their bunkers.

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5 points

I Set up the content filter with „Elon“ and „musk“ which significantly reduced it. Now it’s just posts like these that remain. Can’t recommend enough!

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2 points

But then how am I supposed to find out about the latest manly cologne?

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3 points

Content filters! I’ve got them for Trump, Elon, “Slammed”, “Dragged”, “Blasted” and the question mark, because news headlines in the form of questions can almost always be answered with the word “no” and are not worth my time.

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2 points

This is 100% the answer. My filter list is exhaustive and its curated a feed for me that doesn’t actively destroy my mental health.

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52 points

Could bluesky have won over Mastodon because of the fediverse barrier where people doesn’t know which server to choose?

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95 points

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.

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26 points
*

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.”

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18 points

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.

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6 points

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.

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5 points

Mastodon is confusing as shit though. They could have made is not as confusing, but this is what happens when you get backend only developers designing the front end of a product.

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7 points

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.

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4 points

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

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41 points
*

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.

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5 points

Subscribable block lists… I’m making an account.

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1 point

Yeah this solves a lot of problems straight off the bat. Add me, I have a few posts at the beginning of my timeline that will help you get started.

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2 points

The “starter packs” of Bsky is good, too. (Maybe that’s your ‘add lists’ though.)

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1 point

Yeah it’s rhe add lists

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1 point

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.

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2 points

I just tested it in the app and it worked fine, scrolled for days with a common term like Ukraine.

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1 point

Weird I never noticed. For me the amount of results depends on the search term. There may just be a few items with your term. Have you tried making a feed for it?

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1 point

There is starter packs now but not many have been made and I forgot the website that you find them.

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37 points
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

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5 points

We should just point normal people to the biggest instance and never mention anything until they’re settled in.

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8 points
*

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.

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0 points

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.

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3 points
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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.

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24 points

Bluesky offers better access to the content people want with less effort. Mastodon was always going to lose that battle.

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26 points
*

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

@user.bsky.social vs @user@bsky.social

Plus other things like having starter packs

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1 point

Yes, I think the main problem of Mastodon is that it looks and behaves like if engineers designed it, not designers.

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9 points

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.

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1 point

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.

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1 point

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.

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11 points

Also helps it was created by Jack Dorsey.

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19 points

Who’s now left Bluesky which is probably for the better given his views on a lot of things

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4 points

Agreed. Twitter was still a shitshow, when he sold it. Just not as bad as now.

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2 points

I don’t know how many not tech savvy people know this, but it helps too.

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6 points

Its also able to pay for advertising and marketing

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3 points

Do bluesky advertise itself?

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2 points

Through influencers and social media marketing yes. Through running ads I don’t think so.

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1 point

Do you honestly believe that they don’t?

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7 points

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.)

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1 point

Now someone have to write a server to federate to Bluesky, if for nothing more, as a reality check.

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2 points

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.

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1 point

You can choose a different server on Bluesky, too.

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1 point

Can you? I thought you could in theory, but it was all one server, theirs.

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1 point

I joined Mastodon and it sucked, I didnt know where I was or what the significance of it was. Not a fan, lemmy is similar but seems to have less compartmentalisation relative to youe server.

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17 points

The only thing I wanna see is the ElonJet guy back in a large platform, so that everyone gets easy access to the muskrat’s location. That gets him specially angry as we’ve seen many times

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11 points

But if Elonjet is in Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/elonjet.net

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3 points

I don’t understand why they don’t just put up an RSS feed on elonjet.net Why even use social media posts? They’ve got their own website.

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15 points

Probably because nobody uses RSS. Or websites.

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3 points

Social interactions.

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