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.
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.
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.
I kinda used to like twitter to find related stuff to my interests and content creators in a more digestible form than sifting through subreddits, but nowadays its nigh unusable.
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”.
redditors are the fucking worst.