Sort of like how they moved out of Florida and Texas. Repubs want a brain drain for some reason.
Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
And it’s ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
i get it, its so frustrating. with bluesky we are just hitting the snooze button, theres bound to be problems with a privately owned social network again.
the fact people are categorically rejecting a nazi platform for being nazi is actually pretty refreshing though.
It really isn’t minuscule, it’s still confusing enough for the vast majority of people. Just the fact that there are different servers and them having to learn about that is enough to put people off. Anything more complicated than basic sign-up/in weeds out 90% of people, every tiny little thing they need to learn makes it less likely they’ll even think about using it.
This is obvious. The way you and many others here think about how knowledgeable, tech-literate and willing to lift just one extra finger the average person is isn’t correct, people are dumb and lazy. And it hurts the fediverse as a whole and slows adoption.
Your opinion and my reply here have been said thousands of times, I don’t understand how your kind of ignorance and misunderstanding is still so prevalent, I see it almost weekly.
your kind of ignorance and misunderstanding
I was with you up until this. I was taking about my perception but thanks for generalizing and passing judgement anyway, jerkface.
I also see your kind of bullshit regularly on here, with many not giving the benefit of the doubt, not asking follow up questions, and therefore assuming the worst takes. Every single time.
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Your email server doesn’t also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for me@hotmail.com and hotmail bans you, you’ll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It’s apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that’s associated with logging into your smartphone.
“How can I send Gmails?”
Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
What happens when their server expenses aren’t covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over… oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn’t make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They’re not going to do it again.
This isn’t good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we’re centralizing the network!
This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.
Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don’t push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.
IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).
For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being “join mastodon.social”, with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to “bluesky social”.
It’s a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it’s difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.
I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.
What’s blocking Mastodon’s posts to be discoverable?
In order to discover someone’s posts on Mastodon, they need to be on the same instance as you, or someone else on your instance has to already be following them.
The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.
In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.
I don’t understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don’t want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.
That’s true by and large and we also don’t have enough moderators here as is.
And for reasons I don’t understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don’t transition to the fediverse, as if they won’t bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).
Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I’m curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I’m not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.
Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).
Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)
In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.
Presumably either because they’ve not heard of the Fediverse, because almost nobody has, and/or because they want people to actually see what they post.
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
Probably because it has an algorithm
This.
Many people like stuff getting recommending to them algorithmically.
Exactly. I’ve curated my Mastodon feed way more than Bsky, and still, it’s incredibly boring. Great if you want to use socials less.
It also tends to overvalue new stuff, so whoever screams the most occupies the most space in the feed.
tech and age, need for investment.
- fediverse is complicated for scientists not doing computer sciency stuff
- senior researchers are less flexible with new tech, so similarity w twitter means they don’t have to learn a new system
- Already present audience means there’s little risk in investing time in BS.
It doesn’t though.
Isn’t BlueSky part of a fediverse?
A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub/the one you’re on right now)
I feel like scientists should move towards open source solutions … I feel like most scientists are smart enough to launch a mastodon server, but well.
It costs time and money. The handful of times I published articles in an open access journal, I had to pay close to $5K USD per publication.
Theoretically, researchers can publish on Mastodon or something similar but that unfortunately won’t give us the reach we need. That might be fine with well established names, but for dumb-dumbs like myself who are still trying to make a name for ourselves in our field, we want the highest impact publisher we can find. Those typically come with a price tag.
Sometimes the grant also dictates acceptable publishers where you can submit your manuscript.
Sadly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Being a scientist doesn’t mean you have the technical knowledge to run a public facing server.
Being a scientist kinda means to me you’re able to follow a very easy to understand guide to install mastodon on …
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it’s more feature complete than windows (it isn’t).
I use lemmy because I hate u/spez, not because it’s more feature complete than reddit (it isn’t).
I use blender because it’s free and it’s actually kinda great, if all free and open source software was like blender, then it would be a no-brainer to use FOSS all of the time, and it would be easy to convince the normies to do the same.
also also
I’m using linux mint, i have minor complaints about it, but nothing worse than what microsoft is currently doing with windows. It’s just different, and that bothers me. middle click paste is the bane of my existence, but other people swear by it. Just before I switched over, I learned about windows 10’s built in emoji keyboard, and I really liked that. A year later (literally last week) I discovered a program that does most of what the windows emoji thingy did, and I can manually edit a keybind for the function to accomplish amost the same thing. FOSS, yay, it’s free if you don’t value your time in currency amounts. FOSS could be so good if only it were good.
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
Yes. But there is nothing bluesky does that mastodon doesn’t. It’s a platform to write short text posts and have it viewed by other people. It’s not rocket science.
Some of us have. There are a few science focused servers.
Bluesky is open source though
Going to play devil’s advocate here.
Bluesky is just…better than any Fediverse microblogging platform. In terms of UI, discoverability, and keeping a balance of users in the community.
Mastodon sucks for regular people. And none of the other better platforms like Firefish ever gain enough steam to beat Mastodon because of existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub (this also includes Mastodon itself to an extent).
Mastodon is great.
The only reason why it doesn’t get as much traction is because it doesn’t manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.
That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I’ve seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones “didn’t made them stay as long”. For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
what are those?
existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub
Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.
It’s a great concept. There’s a reason a lot of people use it.
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
There’s a couple contenders but they’re not very good. I think most FOSS people don’t WANT a facebook alternative; they’d prefer to keep their IRL identity separate from the internet. And the people who don’t care also don’t care enough to want to go federated.
There’s spacehey as a myspace alternative though. That’s pretty neat but it’s full of teenagers unfortunately.
Friendica aims at that. I’m not sure about the results as I haven’t tried it.
Diaspora, too, but I’m not sure how active that project is nowadays.
I believe you’ve hit the nail on the head, the only people I’ve noticed that really want such a social media account are generally people who were older than millennial, out of Millennials, gen Z and gen A, I don’t really see much interest in a social media account that is directly linked to your actual identity. Most of them are more interested in a pseuado-anonymous style account that only asks for a username and doesn’t actually link you to a real world identity.
Facebook was great in principle, it was intended as like a college student community and evolved from there, it was never meant to fill the goal of what the platform is doing today.
As such as Facebook deteriorates, there isn’t a huge demand for a Facebook alternative, because the people who are leaving the platform aren’t actively seeking to replace what is lost.
Would be better if it was Mastodon, but I suppose I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and good riddance to Twitter, indeed.
Same here, well said. Bluesky’s not perfect, at least it’s not Twitter. I wish more people would use it though
Cool. I’m going out on a limb and saying Bluesky seems pretty based so far. I made an account when it was announced, and it’s pretty cool. Nice app, seemingly good mission statement.
I don’t want to dismiss something until it actually turns to shit. If it’s good now, I’ll use it now. When it turns to crap, I’ll just jump off. I’ll always have Lemmy and Mastodon as my mains, so I don’t see the harm personally. 🤷♂️ Let’s just hope it’ll last for the scientists’ sake.
Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it’s time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.
Why is it a problem? If a tool is good now, I’ll use it now.
I don’t stop myself from buying a new axe just because it’ll break eventually, you know what I mean?
Although obviously if there was an axe that never would break, I’d buy that! But maybe there are trade-offs. Maybe the never-breaking axe has a complicated handle or something. I don’t know, I’m trying my best with the axe analogy to describe Bluesky vs Mastodon. 😅 Hopefully it’s clear enough!
We can avoid it ever becoming shit when a wannabe dictator buys it if we make it impossible to sell: like mastodon and other federated options.
Right, that’s the sure-fire way. But if a platform is better in some way than another, I’m inclined to use it, as long as it’s morally just to do so.
I like Bluesky because it’s more like Twitter was. But I like Mastodon because of how liberated it is. So I’ll use both, probably, until Bluesky turns to shit (or doesn’t).
It’s a problem for the same reason twitter dying sucks… The network effect is important, and maintaining yours during a slow, piecemeal mass migration is hard. Which is why I’m sticking with mastodon now, despite more of my relevant network being on BS.
Jack Dorsey never had ownership (just directed an investment) and left the board (didn’t agree with moderation, lol)
Jay also isn’t majority owner.
It’s a public benefit corporation too so they don’t have a profit requirement.
The harder parts with decentralizing content-addressed systems like it is scaling open spaces (like how a microblog is technically one big shared space). You need big caches and big indexes. They’re working actively on making it easier for others to run those app servers. There’s already a few independent projects building them. Federating account hosting and feed generation and moderation services are all live already
How many times can people keep making the same mistake without us concluding they’re stupid? Closed corporate social networks ALWAYS go to shit. Enshitification is inevitable. And you’ll have the sunk cost fallacy stopping them from leaving, until they all finally get fed up and switch again. Own your network - stop swapping.
But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don’t need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn’t (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer
But we did leave…
…about a decade too late.
Scientists should consult tech people about stuff like this just like we should consult scientists for science stuff. Unfortunately a lot of tech people also aren’t conscious of this stuff either.
They gotta get their news out to the masses, at least they choose something besides twitter.
There’s no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
nothing makes me more skeptical than seeing the word “scientists” in a headline.
At least they weren’t baffled
Surely there was at least some kind of breakthrough
perhaps a bafflethrough
oof. blue sky was created by the guy who made twitter wasn’t it? if he sells to the next bond villain, blue sky will just become twitter 2.0.
open source, decentralized.
i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
I wouldn’t say never, but fedverse projects will need to find ways to smooth off the rough edges. Also the more enshittifcation happens the more I think people will be willing and able to get past the rough edges. If any one of the services breaks through and becomes mainstream, it’ll provide a roadmap to success for other services and people will be more comfortable with the concepts.
When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.
I would prefer any ActivityPub instance, but press media (and in general private entities), to which scientific institutes intend diffusion, is moving to bluesky…
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
See you can be a really good scientist and not smart at the same time. Move to mastodon.
Neat, I have an account on there already.
