4 ms·

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website i

by edent 2y ago

It is so far behind Mastodon. Both in terms of features and in terms of communities on there. The people I interact with on BlueSky are nice, and the website is serviceable. But like Pebble / T2, I just don't see the momentum there.

andybak 2y ago
I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  Decentralized just doesn't work in a centralized cyberspace. You need to recreate your own centralized cyberspace and then build the underground path to the decentralized canyon. Then provide a mothership allowing others to dock of their own standards and protocols. Yet allowing them to take off at their own accord with the data of the centralized hub.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    > I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered. The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.
  - andybak 2y ago
    > That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I (actually not my personal but a project account) had to move servers because the original server had been blocked by other admins because of a fairly interminable dispute about whether one user had been racist (it was far from clear cut from what I could tell from the brief time I spent digging into it). How is this positive? It seemed to spell out a future where Mastodon split into islands based on long-forgotten generational disputes. I want one network with a clean way to choose who I see and who interacts with me. I don't want other people making this decisions on my behalf.
  - Kye 2y ago
    That's sounds great until the enormous art instance everyone goes to because "it's the art instance" defederates yours over made up and exaggerated reasons despite your instance's admins working hard to solve the few actual problems and being kind and communicative at every step.[0] Petty tyrants try to ruin everything. On Bluesky, there are art feeds for every kind of interest. I've used Mastodon since near the beginning and really only stick around for the small cohort of instances mine is in. It's increasingly all crossposts from Bluesky. >> "If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph." It took a while but I'm convinced they're sincerely working toward account portability. I can at least already point my domain at another PDS even if getting at my posts would be a sketchy, probably very technical operation with command lines and scripts. (For now) These are people who've been working on decentralized social media for as long as it's been a thing (and newer people who share the goal), and it's hard to ignore the dedication to that goal once you look into their histories. [0] https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html
jandrese 2y ago
Having tried both BlueSky and Mastadon I found Bluesky pretty easy to use and Mastadon bewildering. There were so many Mastadon servers I didn't know where to start. I guess maybe it doesn't matter what server something is on because the app can connect to all of them, but then discussion topics would be repeated in multiple places and it all seemed so disjoint. Like the chaos of old IRC networks but amplified. All in all I felt like a babe in the woods on Mastadon while Bluesky is pretty shamelessly just "Twitter minus Nazis". One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. While this might unfortunately facilitate creation of echo chambers it is a supremely powerful anti-troll tool. The other big reason I went with Bluesky over Mastadon is that several of the people I used to follow on Twitter have moved over to Bluesky.
- kelnos 2y ago
  > One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. Oh interesting. This is a really cool feature. It kinda nudges it in the direction of being a private, self-run micro-blogging platform, where replies are essentially comments that you can moderate.
  - dhosek 2y ago
    It does so much to lower the temperature of discussions there. BlueSky is by far my preferred social media platform.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    There's actually a few projects, mostly in Japanese, that use ATProto as a blogging platform. Kinda like how there's other applications using AP.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Mastodon core devs avoid discussion of server choices because it inevitably reveals that 1/3 to 1/2 of Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon by volume and/or users are Japanese image posters incompatible with Western, especially European, languages/memes/values. 2/3 of top 3 and half of top 10-20 Mastodon instances(not including Misskey ActivityPub servers) are Japanese. They really don't like that.
troad 2y ago
I think the primary difference is in the communities. Every six months or so I log back into Mastodon and the discussion there is one hard 'Nope' for me. I don't understand why I'd voluntarily read a platform where every other post is a 'call out' of something 'problematic' according to the warped world view of '@CatMomLibrarian' or something similar. Cutting out the Nazis from Twitter is a great start, but Mastodon has done this by simply doubling down on the other end of the horseshoe. It's Truth Social for the other fringe. BlueSky seems somewhat richer in normal people, but that probably won't last if the platform is successful over time. It seems in the nature of social networks to be taken over by parasitic outrage grifters.
Nextgrid 2y ago
Disagreed - Mastodon has a major problem. The whole concept of server/instance is unnecessary and introduces extra complexity and hard problems. Nostr has it right where servers/instances are completely interchangeable and all the hard work is done by the client. I get why Mastodon had servers at the beginning - because browsers can't speak any other protocol than HTTP towards a single origin domain name. But this limitation fundamentally constrained the entire product into a corner that's very hard/impossible to back out of. Mastodon should've been Nostr in the first place, with "instances" just being read-only views into the network (to satisfy browser's "demand" for an HTTP endpoint), but otherwise would be disposable and interchangeable - all write actions would be made by a client that doesn't have the constraints of a browser and can interact with the decentralized network over an appropriate protocol (and do the necessary cryptographic magic to ensure those peers are trustless and interchangeable). The concept of "instances" not only introduces many user experience problems that makes it a non-starter for non-technical people (or even technical people who just don't have the time/willingness to deal with BS) but also open the door for politically-motivated feuds between instance admins to which the users are held hostage (instead of moderation being done on the client where the user is the only one in control of which "moderation feeds" they subscribe to, similar to an ad blocker list).
wraptile 2y ago
It's super american-centric too. For a "decentralized" platform that basically covers 2 small areas of the world is not a good sign. I feel like Bluesky had done nothing to address discoverability and sharing issues. Most engagement is centralized with 1% of shitposters. From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn't work well globally.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  The 3 main communities seem to be English speaking, Japanese, and Portuguese. The community is way smaller than Xitter for sure but are the percentages that off?
  - wraptile 2y ago
    I've never been exposed to non-US content on Bluesky unlike Mastodon where it's a melting pot from every possible niche and location. To me it seems like Mastodon's focus on hashtags as discovery mechanism won hard in this space thus allowing such diverse communities to thrive on the platform.
    - sbarre 2y ago
      Bluesky is still pretty new. They've only been open to the public for less than 4 months. They are moving slowly on purpose. I get what you're saying but perhaps give it some time to grow? Twitter has been around for almost 20 years now, and Mastodon for who knows how long.
    - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
      There are hashtags on Bluesky as well. There's an implicit language filter around your default language. It was implemented because the Japanese is comparatively as large as the English audience and a lot of English language users were complaining about searches and feeds being filled by Japanese posts. I chat a lot with Japanese Bluesky because I'm fluent in Japanese; probably 50% of my Bluesky activity is with Japanese Bluesky. I've made friends with a Japanese tech reporter and they share their articles with me occasionally, so it's fun to see a non-English speaking perspective. Unfortunately I think a lot of the people who use Mastodon and are trying to dunk on Bluesky are doing so in bad faith or not quite bad faith but a non-willingness to explore Bluesky with the same openness and curiosity as Mastodon (this may purely be from a time perspective, I mean we're all human and only have so much time to devote to internet shitposting.) I used and stopped using Mastodon before the whole Xitter thing, because I had 2 instances shutdown on me for various reasons and didn't want to bother trying again. I'm mostly on Bluesky and it seems to have the same features as Mastodon sans the easy to build instances because ATProto is a more complicated protocol. I find the network of Bluesky (or at least my feed) to be a lot less tech focused and for me this is a win. I already engage with tech people on HN, parts of Reddit, and Discord. I don't need yet another tech site full of the common tech tropes like ranting emotionally into the void or getting hung up on niche things that only tech people care about. Just my $0.02. The feedback about not cross-pollinating non-English-speakers is good though and I've been working on a feed that uses some ML to generate cross-cultural feeds around certain topics. It's been slow going because work has been tough and I'm locked in wedding "hell" in my personal life.

by edent 2y ago

andybak 2y ago

I have up on Mastodon when I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins. Plus realising that global search was something that many admins were fundamentally opposed to. Oh and the array of UX issues that made me suspect that many demographics would never adopt it.

doublerabbit 2y ago
Decentralized just doesn't work in a centralized cyberspace. You need to recreate your own centralized cyberspace and then build the underground path to the decentralized canyon. Then provide a mothership allowing others to dock of their own standards and protocols. Yet allowing them to take off at their own accord with the data of the centralized hub.
kelnos 2y ago
> I had to switch servers because of subs political dispute between admins That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition: Twitter is still by and large where the people are, even if the owner is an insufferable jerk.
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  > I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered. The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.
- andybak 2y ago
  > That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph. I (actually not my personal but a project account) had to move servers because the original server had been blocked by other admins because of a fairly interminable dispute about whether one user had been racist (it was far from clear cut from what I could tell from the brief time I spent digging into it). How is this positive? It seemed to spell out a future where Mastodon split into islands based on long-forgotten generational disputes. I want one network with a clean way to choose who I see and who interacts with me. I don't want other people making this decisions on my behalf.
- Kye 2y ago
  That's sounds great until the enormous art instance everyone goes to because "it's the art instance" defederates yours over made up and exaggerated reasons despite your instance's admins working hard to solve the few actual problems and being kind and communicative at every step.[0] Petty tyrants try to ruin everything. On Bluesky, there are art feeds for every kind of interest. I've used Mastodon since near the beginning and really only stick around for the small cohort of instances mine is in. It's increasingly all crossposts from Bluesky. >> "If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph." It took a while but I'm convinced they're sincerely working toward account portability. I can at least already point my domain at another PDS even if getting at my posts would be a sketchy, probably very technical operation with command lines and scripts. (For now) These are people who've been working on decentralized social media for as long as it's been a thing (and newer people who share the goal), and it's hard to ignore the dedication to that goal once you look into their histories. [0] https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html

jandrese 2y ago

Having tried both BlueSky and Mastadon I found Bluesky pretty easy to use and Mastadon bewildering. There were so many Mastadon servers I didn't know where to start. I guess maybe it doesn't matter what server something is on because the app can connect to all of them, but then discussion topics would be repeated in multiple places and it all seemed so disjoint. Like the chaos of old IRC networks but amplified. All in all I felt like a babe in the woods on Mastadon while Bluesky is pretty shamelessly just "Twitter minus Nazis". One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. While this might unfortunately facilitate creation of echo chambers it is a supremely powerful anti-troll tool. The other big reason I went with Bluesky over Mastadon is that several of the people I used to follow on Twitter have moved over to Bluesky.

kelnos 2y ago
> One thing I like about Bluesky is when a thread starter mutes one of the posters, it mutes them for everybody in the thread, not just the original poster. Oh interesting. This is a really cool feature. It kinda nudges it in the direction of being a private, self-run micro-blogging platform, where replies are essentially comments that you can moderate.
- dhosek 2y ago
  It does so much to lower the temperature of discussions there. BlueSky is by far my preferred social media platform.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  There's actually a few projects, mostly in Japanese, that use ATProto as a blogging platform. Kinda like how there's other applications using AP.
numpad0 2y ago
Mastodon core devs avoid discussion of server choices because it inevitably reveals that 1/3 to 1/2 of Twitter/Bluesky/Mastodon by volume and/or users are Japanese image posters incompatible with Western, especially European, languages/memes/values. 2/3 of top 3 and half of top 10-20 Mastodon instances(not including Misskey ActivityPub servers) are Japanese. They really don't like that.

troad 2y ago

I think the primary difference is in the communities. Every six months or so I log back into Mastodon and the discussion there is one hard 'Nope' for me. I don't understand why I'd voluntarily read a platform where every other post is a 'call out' of something 'problematic' according to the warped world view of '@CatMomLibrarian' or something similar. Cutting out the Nazis from Twitter is a great start, but Mastodon has done this by simply doubling down on the other end of the horseshoe. It's Truth Social for the other fringe. BlueSky seems somewhat richer in normal people, but that probably won't last if the platform is successful over time. It seems in the nature of social networks to be taken over by parasitic outrage grifters.

Nextgrid 2y ago

Disagreed - Mastodon has a major problem. The whole concept of server/instance is unnecessary and introduces extra complexity and hard problems. Nostr has it right where servers/instances are completely interchangeable and all the hard work is done by the client. I get why Mastodon had servers at the beginning - because browsers can't speak any other protocol than HTTP towards a single origin domain name. But this limitation fundamentally constrained the entire product into a corner that's very hard/impossible to back out of. Mastodon should've been Nostr in the first place, with "instances" just being read-only views into the network (to satisfy browser's "demand" for an HTTP endpoint), but otherwise would be disposable and interchangeable - all write actions would be made by a client that doesn't have the constraints of a browser and can interact with the decentralized network over an appropriate protocol (and do the necessary cryptographic magic to ensure those peers are trustless and interchangeable). The concept of "instances" not only introduces many user experience problems that makes it a non-starter for non-technical people (or even technical people who just don't have the time/willingness to deal with BS) but also open the door for politically-motivated feuds between instance admins to which the users are held hostage (instead of moderation being done on the client where the user is the only one in control of which "moderation feeds" they subscribe to, similar to an ad blocker list).

wraptile 2y ago

It's super american-centric too. For a "decentralized" platform that basically covers 2 small areas of the world is not a good sign. I feel like Bluesky had done nothing to address discoverability and sharing issues. Most engagement is centralized with 1% of shitposters. From listening to a podcast with the founder it seems that's their goal too as they want to integrate bluesky with e-commerce which obviously doesn't work well globally.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago
The 3 main communities seem to be English speaking, Japanese, and Portuguese. The community is way smaller than Xitter for sure but are the percentages that off?
- wraptile 2y ago
  I've never been exposed to non-US content on Bluesky unlike Mastodon where it's a melting pot from every possible niche and location. To me it seems like Mastodon's focus on hashtags as discovery mechanism won hard in this space thus allowing such diverse communities to thrive on the platform.
  - sbarre 2y ago
    Bluesky is still pretty new. They've only been open to the public for less than 4 months. They are moving slowly on purpose. I get what you're saying but perhaps give it some time to grow? Twitter has been around for almost 20 years now, and Mastodon for who knows how long.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    There are hashtags on Bluesky as well. There's an implicit language filter around your default language. It was implemented because the Japanese is comparatively as large as the English audience and a lot of English language users were complaining about searches and feeds being filled by Japanese posts. I chat a lot with Japanese Bluesky because I'm fluent in Japanese; probably 50% of my Bluesky activity is with Japanese Bluesky. I've made friends with a Japanese tech reporter and they share their articles with me occasionally, so it's fun to see a non-English speaking perspective. Unfortunately I think a lot of the people who use Mastodon and are trying to dunk on Bluesky are doing so in bad faith or not quite bad faith but a non-willingness to explore Bluesky with the same openness and curiosity as Mastodon (this may purely be from a time perspective, I mean we're all human and only have so much time to devote to internet shitposting.) I used and stopped using Mastodon before the whole Xitter thing, because I had 2 instances shutdown on me for various reasons and didn't want to bother trying again. I'm mostly on Bluesky and it seems to have the same features as Mastodon sans the easy to build instances because ATProto is a more complicated protocol. I find the network of Bluesky (or at least my feed) to be a lot less tech focused and for me this is a win. I already engage with tech people on HN, parts of Reddit, and Discord. I don't need yet another tech site full of the common tech tropes like ranting emotionally into the void or getting hung up on niche things that only tech people care about. Just my $0.02. The feedback about not cross-pollinating non-English-speakers is good though and I've been working on a feed that uses some ML to generate cross-cultural feeds around certain topics. It's been slow going because work has been tough and I'm locked in wedding "hell" in my personal life.