Is it just the momentum and word of mouth, or are there improved features as well?
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Artificial scarcity (invites) and VC funding
Funding from the Vietcong? Interesting…
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Venture Capital
Voice Chat
It’s the plot from Missing In Action 4
You would think after the first 3 times they would’ve brought a cell phone, or maybe figured the armed forces weren’t for them…
like shooting fish in a barrel
Forgive my ramblings, but here’s the main differences I see, from a community perspective:
Bluesky’s for people who loved twitter circa 2015
Mastodon’s for people who loved the format but hated the way the platform made use of it. The community is FOSS-focused and anti-corporate.
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate, but they still want their social media to be on a single platform and tend to dislike federation
Mastodon folks tend to be in smaller circles and more tech enthusedFeatures-wise, Mastodon kills the algorithm in favour of chronological timelines and lists, while Bluesky embraces algorithms, allowing people to even make their own algorithms for the platform. Bluesky’s AT Proto uses “DIDs” to identify users, which are associated directly with a domain[1]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub’s @actor@my.domain.com.
Federation’s still not enabled so I have no clue how things will look and feel on that front, nor am I familiar enough with the protocol to make any claim about how versatile it is. ActivityPub is flexible enough to be a Twitter clone, a reddit clone, a blogging platform, a youtube clone, a twitch clone, a goodreads clone, or several other formats. AT Proto’s currently only proven to work for a Twitter clone.
or subdomain ↩︎
I would argue that most Bluesky users don’t necessarily dislike federation, but rather have no idea what it is, or what the larger Fediverse is.
Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.
He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.
It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate
Bluesky is a for profit company with a crypto person as the CEO and Jack Dorsey on the board so good luck to them I guess
Oh ya, no, 100%. The company is still a for-profit corporation that needs to make ends meet come the 31st. The userbase is what I’m talking about there, and specifically their unprincipled stance wrt corporate control, in paying lip-service to hating corpos, yet wanting everything to be structured around a centralized entity and team who makes it easy to blame someone (1) for anything that goes wrong.
It’s a public benefit
You can just click Follow and start following someone. You don’t have to perform a copy-paste dance to bring the username back to your instance and do the following there.
Wasn’t that fixed - or at least ameliorated - in the newest upgrade of Masto?
It was, yeah. Same with Lemmy for the most part too. I can just search profiles and hit follow like Twitter (derogatory) now
The process got easier in mastodon 4.2.0, now you just have to type in your instance and it takes you to it directly.
Who wants to type anything?
In the Mastodon app you can just click “follow”. Since BS doesn’t have a web interface at all, it’s probably safe to assume that this is not a major reason a BS user would avoid Mastodon. Since they’re not on desktop anyway.
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Thanks didn’t realize that, edited my comment
I only use Mastodon as a desktop website.
They always had a website, but it used to run off a staging subdomain
When federation is live on the main node on bluesky there will still be some similar effects when you follow links from other servers, in that you’ll need to bring that over to your own server somehow to follow and interact.
With Mastodon when you follow another’s link you’re asked to specify your own instance, in Bluesky you’ll enter your domain based username and it will find your instance.
Also with the CDN like BGS caching servers being shared across instances you’ll be able to find more content from your home instance so it will feel more like Twitter. You can directly search for users on other servers.
A place where normies can feel at home, knowing that they won’t feel out of place not having a fursona or favourite Linux distribution and won’t be scolded for not using alt text or some inadvertent picoaggression. Also, the promise of clout.
What? The constant wave of fury porn and Linux propoganda spam isn’t what people join a social media platform for?!??!?
Have you been on bluesky? There’s lots of furries there
Also what do you have against blind people
An advertising budget
It really comes down to this. So many time’s I’ve discovered a cool FOSS project years after it’s existed simply because I hadn’t thought to search for it. Imagine if Linux had the advertising budget of Microsoft or Google. The “Year of the Linux Desktop” would have arrived in '99.
This aspect is one thing that makes me optimistic about the fediverse. A communication platform without ads and where the spread of information is dependent on network effects and word of mouth, means that it’s much harder for a company to force themselves in front of everyone at once using dollars.
Not a lot. Simpler signup flow and ecosystem, more twitter-like timeline and features, better discoverability and some communities that aren’t on Mastodon. FOSS diehards can mince about it all they want and blame idiot users, but the simple fact is people who don’t live and breathe technology still have lots to offer a social network, and Mastodon continues to alienate them in design and in community. Lemmy does too.
I like Mastodon and Lemmy, a lot. I prefer them to the alternatives. But I just signed up for BlueSky and I’m enjoying it a lot even routed through the Mastodon bridge, simply because there are more diverse communities there, whereas my Mastodon feed is 90% tech and dev people despite spending hours and hours hunting for people I used to follow on Twitter. Getting big App.net flashbacks.
I think a ton of what’s wrong with lemmy and mastadon can be attributed to the bias of the user based. They skew very tech literate and liberal. Simple one click sign up and smooth onboarding into a user experience is the only way you will get the mass appeal of something like Twitter, reddit etc. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing honestly… A person is smart, People are dumb.
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I just learnt of bluesky a few hours ago. Wtf do they think it will be different than any of the other corporate social media? We are nearing 20 years since the start of MySpace, do they really think thus time it’s going to be different?
Corporate daddies know how to make things usable for the everyman.
I don’t think that’s it. Lemmy has been super fucking easy for me to onboard and navigate
Like many cases of “success” lately. A well connected and rich parent.
I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can’t deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.
See, that’s exactly why I like Mastodon and want nothing to do with Bluesky. Sounds like we’re both happy this way.
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When I saw the kinds of people who were getting invites to Bluesky I knew I wanted nothing to do with Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0. As you said, it’s just going to be clout-chasing assholes all over again. I guess I prefer small town life to life in the big city, digitally speaking. (Physically I prefer the precise opposite.)
That’s fine, I just want either of them to actually kill twitter for good though and it just doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Mastodon. With Threads potentially joining the Fediverse, I guess who knows.
As for Threads, any threads sites or account gets instablocked on identification for me. I will not peacefully submit to Zuck the Fuck’s embrace/extend/extinguish strategy. I basically want all corporate surveillance antisocial media to die. Ruthlessly murdered, ideally, in a gruesome living vivisection.
Sure, I just meant if Threads and maybe Tumblr are serious about joining the Fediverse, maybe the whole AT Protocol that Bluesky is trying to build will fall into obscurity.
News Flash!
Twitter will never stop being a thing. Myspace is still a thing, after all. Twitter will just stop being a relevant thing. Like Myspace.
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Oh lord that would sell me on mastodon instantly if I weren’t already there.
Perhaps I should clarify: by “good posters”, I don’t mean Wendy’s epically dunking on McDonald’s and I don’t mean “night water hits different” lowest common denominator posters, just ordinary people like you and me shooting the shit. I think it’s sad Mastodon seems to have the reputation that people can’t crack a joke there.
OK this tells me that bluesky is definitely not for me. I am happy with Mastodon. So long as the people I follow (from technology, science, research, literature, owners of cats, dogs, etc etc) remain on Mastodon, I will remain happy.
If you attempt to shitpost on Mastodon things don’t usually go very well. The vibe had to match twitter circa 2013 or else it would never have felt safe enough for the first colonizing species of memes like alf hog to develop like the first plants in a lava field
A megalomaniac owner
Are you referring to Jack Dorsey? He’s not the owner, he just gave them grant money in the beginning. It’s a non-profit so technically no individual “owns” it.
Mastodon is nonprofit. Blue sky is for profit.
You’re right about the Dorsey part.
Wait - are you sure it’s non-profit? If so, why the VC money?
No, he’s wrong (obviously) it’s a for profit startup.
It’s not currently making money but that’s different than nonprofit obviously.
He’s right about the Jack part though.
He’s endorsing Kennedy so yeah there’s that hot mess.
ew gross
Ah yeah i stand corrected:
“Prior to the seed round, Bluesky’s website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by Graber and other Bluesky employees.[33] Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp.”
oooh i stand corrected anywho that makes me more anxious to try it if they would just send me my gd invite that i requested like a year ago ;__;
- No HOA complaining that you didn’t CW a picture with eye contact or food or alcohol or matter
- More witty people from X
- No drama about who is defederating with who
Which instance have you been on?
My instance is great, although I wish we would switch to glitch-soc so we could have instance-only visibility on posts. I don’t really see much inter-instance drama and I generally don’t get harassed by people who think I need to post a certain way (maybe because I’ve been on Masto since 2018 and they have been on less than a year?)
But those are still legitimate problems for a lot of people.
cupoftea.social says hello :wave: runs on glitch and has boosts in the timeline.
Easier sign up. On BlueSky you can just sign up for an account and go. You don’t have to worry about picking an instance or anything like on Mastodon, which can be a bit off-putting for someone not familiar with federation.
It’s ridiculous how much Mastodon advocates downplay this.
I strongly prefer Mastodon over the alternatives, but the onboarding experience is BAD for the average user.
Onboarding to Mastodon is actually identical to BS/Threads now. They’ve made huge improvements. It’s a shame that most of the news media’s experience discovering Mastodon for the first time was in Oct '22 because it’s left a bit of a “techie” aura around the whole thing they’re still trying to shake off. If Mastodon was then where it is now, I don’t even think BS or Threads would try to compete.
A lot of journalists are really bad at using the machine they use to do their job and it shows.
For a while now, the app has been really easy to sign up on, and now the website is the same.
Isn’t BlueSky still on an invite system?
FYI- Signing up and following people on the Mastodon app now is literally just as easy as it is on BS. All the Federation stuff is hidden unless you want to look for it. It’s very nice.
I’ve been on the waiting list for months now, at least there are Mastodon instances with open registration available.
Want an invite?
Look, on Mastodon you have to pick a server. That’s just too hard to do.
That’s why email never took off.
unironically this.
You think ‘oh it’s not that hard to just pick a sever’, but it is. Most people look at it and go 'well my favorite influencer or friend is on X, but I can only make an account on Y. Can I still communicate with them?! Which advantage has sever Y over server Z? etc. It’s it’s ONE barrier which is one barrier too much for many people (on top of all the new things they have to learn anyway when they decide to get on a new social network)
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do - and it’s scary to them to be confronted with a question about system architecture, when all they want to do is read news or memes.
And it’s interesting that you mention email, because I’d argue email has the exact same problem. Depending on which country you live in, you’ll notice that most people use primarily one email provider per region/country. Why? because their friends use the same email provider. You know how many people told me “well, I don’t have email, but I can give you my Gmail if you want…?” Email just ‘took off’ because it had nothing to compete with for 20 years and businesses depended on it as well.
Most people don’t know the ins and outs of how these federated systems work, like you do
I don’t think you at all need to understand federation other than it means you can join from multiple places and that typically they mostly all talk so just pick a medium to popular one.
I still don’t really understand exactly how federation works and I don’t think it hinders me at all to not understand it.
Sarcasm aside, you’re not wrong. The top result for “Lemmy” (that isn’t about Motörhead) is for Join-Lemmy.org. I’m a tech-minded person, but when I saw this “join a server” crap instead of a front page, I decided that I’m too old and that it’s too much effort to figure out. Now imagine someone who isn’t tech-minded wants to join. They’ll fuck off even sooner than I did.
Hell, the only reason why I’m here is because I decided that Imgur isn’t a good alternative. They’re no better than reddit (i.e. no 3rd party apps). So I decided to stop being lazy and figure it the fuck out. Others might not be as motivated.
It’s ironic because bluesky is also going to have multiple servers sometime soon
… meanwhile, every account system: please enter your email
he forgot to put : /s
Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.
On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.
On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.
The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.
Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.
My money’s on BS never federating at all. Mastodon Instances are communities unto themselves. The way BS is set up means an “instance” is essentially just free additional hosting for BlueSky Inc. It’s decentralized similarly to how crypto is decentralized. Of course, what else would one expect from Jack.
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For real. It’s not like Twitter was markedly different before Elon.
There’s a sandbox with federation with third party clients already live. Every piece of the system can be federated or substituted.
If somebody wanted to fork out and federate in open now they could. They aren’t doing so because it’s still work in progress, especially moderation tooling and scaling needs improvements
Bluesky is to Mastodon & ActivityPub, what Matrix is to XMPP/IRC… a completely over-engineered system, ignoring all well established international standards and run by a for-profit entity with venture capital funding.
that actually explains why i find matrix so annoying, thanks.
Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have. I don’t think you understand how the Matrix protocol at works, and I assume you are blindly repeating what you read online that XMPP must be better because it supposedly has less lines of code, though I’m sure you didn’t check that either.
I hate to inform you that I know the insides of both pretty well and run both myself on my server and have evaluated the differences extensively 🤷♂️
Oh and:
That’s awesome, and I still know that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But damn you made me a soyjack, that definitely tells me you’ve actually looked into the technical differences.
Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have.
What an utterly depressing statement. Because Matrix is utter shit.
Go ahead and elaborate on what problems the protocol has.
I don’t give a shit about the “protocol”. I give a shit about the end experience: the system, not a single component of it. (The fact that you’re so narrowly defining the range of critique is very telling and noted, incidentally.)
I’ve given Matrix three tries now. Three times Element has shit its pants, lost all my keys, refused to recognize the backups I made using its own tools, and made me start over from scratch. It’s a fucking shit system, no matter how good or bad its “protocol” is.
Come back when you’ve got a product that doesn’t suck so hard it can suck bowling balls through garden hoses. (Well, no, don’t come back. Matrix is on the permanent shitpile for me along with Emacs, Haskell, Internet Explorer and other such software fiascos of epic proportions.) But start pitching the product when you’ve got a product that isn’t a festering pustule that periodically pops and spreads its grotesque fluids all over the place, not now when it’s like a rusty chainsaw made without a kickback guard.
One of the first things that you’d need to do to make the system not suck matter out of galactic core black holes is to look over the “Fallacies of Distributed Computing” and make sure that you didn’t interpret it as an instruction manual instead of a warning against them.
It’s not narrowly defined lol, you literally said Matrix so I asked about Matrix. XMPP is a protocol, so obviously I’m going to ask why you prefer one protocol over the other. It’s like saying you hate the http protocol, but really you’re actually talking about a specific browser, it makes no sense.
You not liking Element is an entirely different conversation.
. Element is like the Ubuntu of matrix clients.
The other Matrix clients were worse.
The entire ecosystem is shit. Fix it if you want people who aren’t dedicated fanbois to use it.
And when the venture capital runs out, they will need to turn a profit. And the cycle of enshittification will continue.
