The name “Mastodon” sucks as much as “X”. I’ve never had a Twitter account nor do I want to open an account in any of the services, but Mastodon does not sound catchy to who they need to attract.
As someone who uses both. I think Mastodon also just doesn’t have the users, it is not as easy to setup and I think understanding instances and its UI are less user friendly.
Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.
It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.
Just to add to the many responses here with a simple quip on this issue (which I’m taking from one else)
The fediverse presumes people care more about independence than socialising. For most it’s the other way around.
IE: it’s about the socialising “stupid”.
Even for us techy types happy with the system here … it means we get to socialise with like minded people. The independence we have here is often secondary, I’d wager, to what we all get out of this.
Mastodon emerges as the clear winner. It’s free from investor influence, ad-free, and controlled by a community that values user autonomy over profit.
That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this. The tech-abled and tech-writers are in as much of a bubble as the Democrats were this past election.
The vast majority of people using social media do so for entertainment and passive news consumption and a ton of rage bait. Who owns or controls it is entirely irrelevant - ex., TikTok.
Ads? You think people in 2024 still care about ads? I think a lot of them enjoy it. Moreover, if you’re a small or local business, you want a platform that allows you to promote your goods and services. This kind of opportunity is what made social media explode. If you were a community business, would you prefer to operate on a platform that was strictly chronological or one that allowed you to pay to get noticed? What if you were an “influencer”? While normal people may dislike this stuff, it’s this stuff that generates revenue for the platform and, like it or not, increases engagement.
This lack of openness confines users to BlueSky alone, making it difficult to connect with friends on other platforms without creating a separate account.
How has this prevented Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube from succeeding?
You’re trying to force a platform to do what you want it to do. You’re not objectively looking at what the majority of social media users want. When I tell people about interconnected platforms, they have no clue what that means or why they would want that. They just want one platform.
You and I recognize the benefits of the Fediverse meaning one application to access many platforms. That may be a reality we observe one day but for now, nothing is fully developed. You’re trying to convince people that robotaxies will replace vehicle ownership today when they’re not done deploying them.
Mastodon’s structure, lacking an algorithm to push specific content, gives users freedom to create a feed that genuinely reflects their interests. For those who are politically inclined, Mastodon has communities and accounts covering all sides, but there’s no algorithm driving you toward any specific viewpoint.
If Bluesky has an algorithm, I haven’t seen it. I get chronological posts from the accounts I follow with an occasional and subtle suggestion to follow other similar accounts. Many of the accounts I follow are news outlets, journalists, civic leaders, etc. Some of the accounts I followed on Twitter are finally joining Bluesky while less than a fraction of those are on Mastodon.
I’ve been using Mastodon more than Bluesky. I like the instance I’m a member of which is operated by people in my physical community. Today I saw that more and more members of my community have joined Bluesky, including my local paper. I can not express the joy I’ve felt this afternoon seeing a platform blossom like the Twitter of old.
Betamax was superior to VHS. DVD Audio was superior to SACD. You may think the flexibility of Windows or Android makes them superior to MacOS or iOS. Ultimately, it comes down to marketing and convenience.
How do you make Mastodon better? You have to get brands over there. You have to get journalists and news outlets over there. When CNN reports that someone said something on Twitter, that’s marketing for that platform. When [the news] starts reporting that [celebrity] or [president] posted on Mastodon - then maybe you’ll start getting some traction. But why would that person post something so important on a platform with so few users?
If Bluesky has an algorithm, I haven’t seen it. I get chronological posts from the accounts I follow with an occasional and subtle suggestion to follow other similar accounts. Many of the accounts I follow are news outlets, journalists, civic leaders, etc. Some of the accounts I followed on Twitter are finally joining Bluesky while less than a fraction of those are on Mastodon.
Bluesky does it even better IMO. Their default feed is a chronological feed of all the people you follow and you can add additional feeds that have their own algorithms (You can even create your own either with simple logic through something like skyfeed.app or code it entirely from scratch). This makes it much easier to choose what you want to see compared to Mastodon.
The feeds are the strongest feature Bluesky has.
Yeah - it feels more organic to me. Bluesky feels like a more well thought out Twitter. Mastodon feels like something built from Google Wave scraps.
I’m not sure how much of Dorsey’s DNA is left but it’s hard to imagine someone who has had so much success wouldn’t know what they’re doing. The board could certainly screw it up, just as Twitter’s did by selling, but it seems like they’re growing slowly and doing things in a productive way. Slow and intentionally growth seems to be the growing trend in tech.
With that said, I’m aware of the funding concerns and I’m trying to pay attention. Where will their money come from is still a question. Will they use ads or subscriptions? I’d prefer the option for either and not both. Is it actually an issue that someone tied to blockchain is involved? I’m not sure but I’m open to a plausible argument.
Personally I would prefer a subscription instead of ads. I hate ads. I’d rather pay directly.
Wouldn’t be too bad if they did the model of showing you a persistent banner ad with the option to pay $35 a year to get rid of it. I’d be down with that.
i know so many ppl that purchase products: “from an ad i saw on (whatever social media they use)” it blows my mind, seriously.
Yeah absolutely. I have never clicked through an ad on the internet. My click through rate is literally zero. On the incredibly rare instance that I see something I like from an ad, I do some research first then go to the relevant website.
That’s why they’re so pervasive, they work on the majority of people (that’s not us).
That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this.
For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.
To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.
Mastodon is lead by a singular developer that uses Ruby for his app that hasnt gotten a new feature in 2+ years and they dont accept pull requests from community members that have been adding features to third party apps that new users never learn exist because they get stufk between learning what a “fediverse instance” is
Meanwhile Bluesky has features twitter or any other platform dont have yet (custom algorithms, chronological feed with a couple posts from your custom feeds in between some chronological posts, adding custom moderators)
The protocol that Bluesky used also has a lemmy/reddit alternative too https://frontpage.fyi/ (in beta)
The fact that the fediverse has been mentally limited to “Mastodon and Lemmy” is so sad. The features many people complained weren’t on Mastodon were right there on Akkoma, Misskey, Friendica, Hometown, and others. But nobody would even look at them.
Even on the fediverse nobody wants to discuss the sea of alternative services.
That’s definitely not beta, it feels more like a very early alpha
And it looks more like Hacker News or lobste.rs, not Lemmy or Reddit, since it doesn’t allow the creation of threads, only posting URLs?
Speaking of things people are better without, I wish everyone would stop using Medium. There’s so many better alternatives - Write Freely, Wordpress, Ghost, just to name a few.
Yeah maybe posting it here doesn’t really help?
Nope. Every post I’ve seen about Bluesky has me confused for this exact reason. If it wasn’t for people talking about Lemmy in mass on another platform I had no idea the Fediverse is.
All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.
If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.
I think that if you want BlueSky like growth for activity pub… You federate with Threads. Or another hypothetical flagship where everyone is sent. Stop worrying spreading users around so much. People who join that network on the flagship can learn about federation and instance switching later.
I’m sure many people on activitypub would prefer that it grows more like it has though.
You federate with Threads
Nice try, fed.
I remember when I first tried to use Mastodon and struggled with how best to make it work, so I asked what was probably a basic question to the Enlightened™. Instead of being helped, I was met with “it’s easy, maybe you’re just dense?”.
Then I thought that maybe Mastodon doesn’t have the kind of people I’d want to interact with on it.
Unironically, this makes me pine for the old days where usenet discussions were lively.
Mm, reminds me of the old world of IRC. I still remember fondly when I asked for help installing FreeBSD, and got banned with a message of “try linux”.
So I did, never looked back. (Until I got a Mac at least, which counts as a BSD.)
That’s kind of hilarious :D
I’ve never see anyone respond with hostility to any ‘how to’ question on mastodon. What you’ve described sounds totally unlike anything I’ve seen there. So if you have a link to your discussion, I’d be interested in seeing how that happened.
While I generally avoid politics on this blog, it’s hard to ignore the political biases permeating X and BlueSky. X has veered heavily toward far-right ideologies, while BlueSky is often associated with far-left communities. This polarized landscape doesn’t work for those of us seeking a neutral space for meaningful interactions.
lol
Gives big “both sides are bad” energy
That’s it, pack it up. We’re done here
That cracked me up
We cannot win by changing the fediverse into something like what we left behind because it will no longer be the fediverse we know and love, all we have is the good fight of educating people on why it is better and ourselves as an example - a city on a hill to which others may flock if they see the shine, and it may not be a fight we can win but it is the only fight worth fighting.
where pleroma
where akkoma
where misskey
where firefish
where iceshrimp
where sharkey
where cherrypick
where catodon
where mitra
What’s cherrypick
Another feature-rich Forkey from before Firefish’s first “death” which, as I’ve read somewhere, must have managed to iron out more of Misskey’s original issues than the other Forkeys.
Nice! Does it support MRFs?
No idea, I’m not that deeply into it.
Just some hours ago I read a post about how Bluesky will be the one to defeat Twitter… who should I believe?? ;_; XD
I promise you mastodon will never, ever be a true Twitter competitor.
You mean it has not what it takes as a platform?
installs both
Now… fight for my amusement.
It will be interesting to see which one wins out, like how Lemmy won out vs kbin/mbin, since kbin never accepted any outside help and stopped contributing. Not really putting the open in open-source that way, IMO.
I picked kbin for no particular reason and then moved to lemmy. Kbin was a dumpster fire of spam and downtime. Seems to be permanently broken as of the last 2 months minimum
This is the correct attitude.
Mastodon is better.
Mastodon would be fine if all I cared to follow was Linux news and if I understood German and Japanese.
Hell yeah! Sign me up!
Yeah swear. Gardening would be fine if all I cared about was dirt and weeds.
Fucking me the change you wanna see. Invite your friends to use the platform and post your own shit
Or I could go to bluesky where that change is already in place.
Bad idea. Bluesky’s just gonna end up like Twitter.
The Fediverse could get shitty in new ways too, but it can’t get Elon’d. Bluesky eventually will. The future is on the Fediverse. All we’re doing is delaying that future by swapping one corporation for another.
Though maybe that future needs to be delayed, because the Fediverse needs to lose its “yeah our app can do that thing you want, just edit a few variables in the source code”-style github energy.
Mastodon is ultimately usable, because I figured it out, but it should have been easier, and needs to get easier. Maybe it has the rise and fall of bluesky to figure that out.
If all Mastodon wants is linux shit then only linux people are gonna stick around. Never mind that I get the exact same linux posts on bluesky from the same people on top of other topics I care to follow.
People tried to bring more content through bridges. Mastodonians promptly started crying about how it literally puts peoples lifes in danger. Some still have #nobridge tags in their profiles to this day, thinking it matters somehow in an open network.
Bluesky is far more user friendly and that’s why the people are going there. I get it, y’all love federation and ActivityPub, but no one wants to pick an instance, much less read a manifesto on decentralized social media. (Frankly, Lemmy has much of the same issues.)
I have had a Mastodon account since Elmo Muskrat bought Twitter, but it’s practically useless as few outside some specific IT-oriented users are on it. I got Bluesky, and it’s been way better as it attracts a larger variety of people.
I think the bigger problem is that there’s no universal search that will find something on any of the instances you aren’t blocking.
Search is not authoritative like it is on centralized social media.
