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.
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.
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Yeah that’s another thing, Mastodon is kinda nice, except for its userbase. :P
Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn’t give a fuck about federation, yet it’s the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.
I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you’re flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.
Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven’t implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.
Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter’s original founders.
Yhea your first mistake is thinking that 99% give a flying fuck about federation
It just makes it’s more complex to adopt
Bluesky ?
Go on there, sign-up, done
Everything works.
Nothing else to do. Nothing to understand.
The lemmy devs should add a feature to their website where you can just create and account and it creates and account on an instance that is closest geographically to the IP address you are connecting from and is federated with the most servers.
Single place for normies to make an account and they don’t have to think about the federation bits, but if they get interested they can always make an account manually on another instance.
Probably some filter would be needed. Like a list of curated instances.
Imagine if the geographically closest is the Furry instance.
Perfection.
Two things I don’t see anybody saying:
- BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn’t won by having a better product, it’s won by convincing people they should buy your product.
- Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that’s just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn’t have like a 90% miss rate.
I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”
Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.
The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.
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.
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.
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.
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/
“Everyone is joining BlueSky so now i am too i guess lol”
I doubt anybody knows what Mastodon is.
I agree with the other commenter’s points, but one thing I think people forget to mention is that BlueSky feels like Twitter in a way Mastodon just doesn’t. When I am trying to pitch Mastodon to people, I usually compare it to Tumblr because the vibes are similar.
Mastodon is also flat out hostile to influencers, and by that I mean the platform is designed to be terrible to influencers. The lack of an alogarithm means you can’t game the system, no quote tweets means you get less opportunities to spread, no reply limiting means your notifications are going to be going nuts from the replies. The culture on Mastodon is difficult to game too, since people there expect thoughtful responses to their replies.
Because in Bluesky, you open the app, create an account, and you’re good to go.
Federation is way too complex of an idea for the average person. Picking a server and then understanding instances is much too complicated.
The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn’t require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.
I think the problem is Mastodon makes it hard to find people to follow. I can’t even find mainstream media official accounts, let alone an actual celebrity. The discovery features need to be improved.
Meanwhile on BlueSky I instantly see every major news outlet in my main feed.
For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.
Maybe you just arent the main target and thus be more suited to Mastodon rather than BlueSky.
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.
“my taste is better than yours👆🤓” type vibes
I can’t tell for BlueSky because I have not joined yet, but I did create a Mastodon account months ago and I’m not sure what to do with it or how to interact with others. I find it confusing.
On Twitter I was mostly following a bunch of like minded people, liking their stuff, and I could see what they liked too. But on Mastodon there’s uuh, boosts and favorites?! I’m not sure of how it works or what I’m doing. I can’t just “like” posts? I have to boost them?! I found the people I liked that were on Twitter, but on Mastodon I feel like there’s nothing I can do aside from seeing posts and it’s just not attractive.
Boosting is retweeting. Favoriting is liking.
There is no algorithm spying on you across the web and recording your actions and behavior to try and force you to engage with an automated sub-optimal content stream, you have to manually curate your own (hopefully optimal) content stream, which you then engage with. That’s basically the difference between Mastodon and the rest of them.
the instances I join keep collapsing and getting deleted
Nice profile picture!
ah thank u, it is a bit silly