I’s heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it’s just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.
And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I’ve come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.
This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.
(To be clear, I’ve never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I’m asking specifically so that I don’t have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)
Edit:
Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that “federation” there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon’s federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don’t and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky’s overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
Instead of comparing these smaller platforms together to find out why one is better or not people should be focusing on why xitter and Facebook are still two of the most popular forms of social media.
Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.
That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.
I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.
A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.
Bluesky has brand recognition (founded by the same dude as Twitter), more people and “feels like twitter”, in the sense of what you see, more than mastodon. Also, news outlets seem to be migrating there.
Mastodon (and pleroma, misskey, etc) is seen as a place for weirdos and techies, with “nothing interesting going on”. Several people mentioned this already one way or another, but that most servers/instances are “specific” about whatever means that people will feel that they might miss out on something by choosing the wrong server.
It’s more difficult to run government psyops on mastodon.
Because they miss the algorithm
Easy.
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No one outside of the fediverse bubble gives a fuck about federation. It solves a problem no one has, and offers no real solutions to problems users have.
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Mastodon offers nothing on the Twitter experience outside of “but it’s federated”
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Bro do you really think common people know all about this open source interconnected stuff. Get out of your linux bubble
Right, I’m super pro open source but most normal people don’t give a shit. Sure I think those people are stupid, but it doesn’t change reality.
Mainstream tech adoption needs a neat clean wrapper imo. I think that’s the biggest missing piece to fediverse, people want pretty, simple, plug and play.
If a wrapper like that could be put on top of/combined with all the good qualities that the fediverse offers, I think it would create optimal conditions for slow adoption.
Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.
It’s the raison d’etre. Saying “don’t federate” is like saying “don’t put images and rich hyperlinking on the WWW, just make it like Gopher.” If you don’t want to federate, don’t. But saying that it was a bad move for ActivityPub is just nonsensical.
BlueSky doesnt club you with nonstop Linux nerds
Mastodon being federated is absolutely not a flaw. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place. The fact that people got used to using centralized platforms is an aberration and this needs to be actively fought against.
I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.
The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.
I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that federation is a significant obstacle in practice. Email is a great example of a federated platform that even the least tech literate people are able to use just fine. It could be argued that Mastodon onboarding process could be smoother, but that’s not an inherent problem with it being federated.
In my view, the simplest answer is that BlueSky has much better marketing because it has a ton of money behind it and it’s been promoted by Dorsey whom people knew from Twitter. So, when people started abandoning Twitter, they naturally went to the next platform he was promoting.
I’d also argue that there is a big advantage to having smaller communities of users that focus on specific topics of interest and can federate with each other. In my experience, this creates more engaging and friendlier environment than having all the users on the same server. Growth for the sake of growth is largely meaningless.
You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.
You have to pick a microblogging service. What’s the difference? Truth Social is just a mastodon instance, but it’s commercial and it has marketing. That’s all that’s “missing” from any other fediverse instance, and thank fucking god.
This, when I decided to join Mastodon I was prompted to choose a server and had to research which one should join and understand how it works.
It is called UX friction and is well studied in sign up and checkout processes, the more steps the user has to perform the more likely it abandons it.
Just pick one, you’re thinking too hard. I just picked one that’s open because I didn’t want to write an essay about myself to prove my worth and get someone to accept me, because I know that there isn’t any reason why anyone would accept me over someone else (I’m a nobody). I hate the idea of someone else having to review my worth before being allowed to sign up, what a disgusting concept. “Oh it’s to stop spam 🤓” All the other sites have been dealing with Spam good enough without asking me to prove my worth to them, maybe the Fediverse should take some pointers from the big boys at Big tech, they seem to be doing better than you are when it comes to this.
Eww no, I definitely don’t want them to take any pointers from big tech. Their anti-spam methods are way too restrictive and invasive to your privacy. I don’t want to give my phone number to websites just to sign up. And I cannot even view Youtube videos or Instagram posts because they are blocking the IPv6 address of my 6in4 tunnel which I need because my ISP doesn’t have IPv6 yet. I have to sign in to “confirm you are not a bot”.
Felt the same about Lemmy when I signed up.
The only reason I actually wound up signing up on Lemmy is that there is one “main” instance by appearance, and it lets you participate in others(?). (Lemmy.world)
You don’t need to know any of the more esoteric stuff to get going.
Is Mastadon different?
I don’t know, I use BSKY.
Hint: https://mastodon.social/
Lol, fair enough.
Just pick an open one, that’s the easiest choice. No essays, no worrying about being denied, easy.
You’ve stated this at least twice in this thread. People aren’t like that, just in general. Heck, I understood it and still had trouble picking a server for Lemmy and mastadon.
Do I want a single topic or domain to define me? Will a small server have popular posts? Will it have popular people? I can’t find this popular account because I’m typing in username instead of user+domain.
I created and deleted at least 5 before I gave up and just picked one. Is that what most people would do?
I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think you are not putting yourself in the shoes of most users who want to follow a celebrity or a train station or space agency and can’t even find their account.
There are at least three viable commercial microblogging sites right now. So you already have all these problems, without even considering the Fediverse. The Fediverse is the SOLUTION to these problems, not the cause.
☝️ This. It’s why I put off signing up for Mastodon for a long time, even though I am a big supporter of the Fediverse.
How is picking a Mastodon server different from signing up for email, finding a discord server, signing up to follow channels on youtube, and so on. Somehow people have no problems figuring those things out, but when it comes to Mastodon this is constantly brought up like some insurmountable challenge.
I agree with you, but to be fair, people don’t really choose an email provider. They chose gmail, because anything else is disallowed by everyone’s anti-spam measures.
That’s a recent phenomenon though, and it’s effectively been forced on people by the largest email provider making it difficult to use others. My original point was that people didn’t find it confusing to register for different mail providers when that was easy to do.
Email has taken 25 years to get people that comfortable with it, and most folks either go with their ISP email, or one of 3 or 4 providers. Discord, you’re already in the tech savvy population.
Yet, the fact remains that people did get comfortable with email, and even the least tech illiterate people are able to use it.
Having to make an informed decision is a barrier to entry. it took me a while because I wanted to make sure I didn’t join (and waste time/effort) something I didn’t align with.
You don’t have to make an informed decision. Signing up for an instance isn’t a blood pact. If you find the instance you singed up for isn’t to your liking, You can easily migrate your account to another. Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587
That definitely makes a difference, you can choose which but by default it already selects one so some people won’t even change it for convenience, however, that’s not a thing on Mastodon so… Also, a lot of those are mobile users and BlueSky has a lot more Twitter-like familiar UI than Mastodon apps (maybe I’m wrong and if so, point me to which one because there are so many… there goes another issue and convenience out of the window for people who just don’t care about searching and wants something to be done quick - so basically most of Twitter users that still didn’t leave it or went to BlueSky)
the discovery on bsky is pretty nice, i dont see an equivalent on my masto instance
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”
Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.
So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.
You literally cannot search for Mastodon without getting a weird ass 2-paragraph manifesto about The Fediverse.
End users just want to use shit.
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Yeah that’s another thing, Mastodon is kinda nice, except for its userbase. :P
Honestly?
I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?
Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).
And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.
I mean, Lemmy is basically a big discussion forum to share links or get an argument going. You’re obviously gonna get more confrontations.
Bsky/Mastodon/Threads is strangers yelling their thoughts into the void in between posts about their cats or pictures of themselves. Not exactly a place where most people will go in with the intention of dissenting.
And yet?
Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.
Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.
My interactions on Mastodon are far fewer than on Lemmy, though.
IMO, Lemmy is like a CoOp video game where you’re supposed to interact together, and Mastodon is like watching someone else play a solo video game.
Both can be good, but they serve different purposes to me.
I think thats by design. Microblogging vs Forums.
Ths former, like the bird app is to yell into the void and hear what others yell while lemmy and reddit is built around it’s comment sections.
This is exactly why I never got into Xitter or Mastodon. I’ve tried them, but it’s a lot of work sifting through stuff to try to find somebody you want to follow. And newsflash, I don’t find many people that interesting that I want to hear what they say repeatedly.
Whereas forum style I can more easily find content I enjoy, then also possibly enjoy the comments as well.
Neither is right or wrong, it’s just a different approach to online engagement.
redditors are the fucking worst.
A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.
And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.
It was major human infrastructure failure.
And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.
The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.
The difference is that you won’t find yourself unable to send an e-mail because the admin of your e-mail server doesn’t like someone from the recipient’s e-mail server.
No? There are a lot of mail providers that are listed as spam on other providers „just because“. So yes, that literally does happen.
Well, you know that by desing wassap, telegram, etc can communicate with each other but they intentionally cut that feature to only be able to menssege server internally?
I mean, that is a possible thing for your e-mail admin to do. They just generally don’t.
Why not?
Because it’s virtually never a thing that happens.
I see you never had to jump through the hoops to get Gmail to not silently drop all your emails.
That is a completely different issue.
Personal answer: I draw art for a stupidly niche internet community. I’m a less popular artist so I go wear the community already is. I found one other artist on Mastodon and several on Bluesky.
People expecting a new Twitter when switching to Mastodon were met with weird behavior and nerds who told them the awful search function or weird comment count is working correctly because that’s how federation works. Well if that’s the case then federation is shit.
This is unfortunately the world of open-source.
- Nerd tells you to use the open-source thing.
- Non-technical tries it and asks questions
- Nerd proclaims it’s not a real problem/your fault/not applicable/fix it yourself
- Some company takes that open-source version or idea, makes it easier for end users and monetize it
- Nerd gets angry and repeats step 1
Source: I am nerd and I contribute to open-source.
