Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
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People didn’t go to Bluesky because of an informed choice based on features or security. People went to Bluesky because that’s where everyone they want to follow went.
But Bluesky does have a lot better features when it comes to actually effectively using the platform. Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon, and I do think that’s a big part of why it’s become the preferred destination recently. Mastodon had a real shot early on but didn’t make it easy enough for people.
I know you’ll get blowback for this, eye rolls and such about how it’s not that hard, but I’ve been building social software for ordinary humans for almost 25 years and you are quite correct. Honestly the Mastodon PR itself was too complex. Anytime you heard about it, you heard not about what a hot social destination it is, but how cool its distributed technology model is and that shit just flies over most peoples heads and actually scares them into think it will be complex and hard. Then you prompt them to choose an instance and it’s just game over. Ordinary users have the attention span of a fruit fly.
You’re 100% right. I’m a technical person and until I started diving deep into my journey to manage my privacy better, I didn’t understand the appeal. NOW I do but to others points, when I first started looking to just leave Twitter, the people I followed were on Bluesky. I can’t find many people on mastodon.
You can convenience or security, never both. Unfortunately bluesky’s compromises towards convenience hurt it’s security measures against enshittification
For me it’s the difference between something that’s usable for its purpose and something that’s not. As much as I wanted to use Mastodon and tried, it just never got off the ground. If Mastodon introduced starter packs, subscribable block lists, topic tagging and blocks, etc. I would use it in the same way I do Bluesky. But it hasn’t done that so I don’t.
Yup, the network effect is real.
Bluesky isn’t Twitter. That’s all that mattered to most people. A few influential people went there first and the network effect kicked in.
Hell I wouldn’t even say that… they don’t understand it, they don’t care to understand it, they don’t know or care what federated means. They went there because, it’s not currently nazified twitter.
I get that it’s “technically” federated… but practically it’s for all practical purposes just a proprietary program, run by a group that isn’t currently horrific. Unfortunately everything I see in it says, it’s every bit as vulnerable, and it can be good for as long as the owners care about not becoming a nazi propoganda machine. Actual recourse from it going evil… is non existant.
None of the people I follow are active on Mastodon. The selling point to me for Bluesky is that it’s essentially a Twitter clone not owned by a billionaire. It’s friendly to the communities I’m part of specifically and doesn’t have ads. What more should anyone ask for from a social media platform?
What more you should ask is precisely that it’s not owned privately. Otherwise, soon the next Elmo comes along and buys this one too.
Sure, I get that, it’s just when it eventually becomes corrupt or falls apart, everyone that moved from Twitter to Threads to Bluesky will find another platform. Nobody is going to move to Mastodon until the people they want to follow move there too.
In my three attempts to make Mastodon work for my needs in the last few years, I can’t follow NBA or NFL news, catch up on AEW wrestling or hang out with IRL friends.
The content I want/need simply isn’t there. Until it is, i don’t really care how private it is or how perfectly decentralized it is.
Bring them to Mastodon. I got family to join because it is the exclusive place that they can see updates on my life and see pics of the family. I have no qualms about not talking to most of my family though 🤷🏻♂️
That’s how it is today, that is how most of these projects start out. Google too was “do no evil” and look at what it is today, or what it’s been for the last decade.
How will bluesky be tomorrow?
It surly can’t avoid having ads permanently tho?
I assume they’re just burning cash rn but will eventually need to have sustainable income. Alternatively Mastodon is an actual non-profit, it doesn’t need to have the same type of income
This is why I can’t get into it. The whole twitter format just feels so unappealing to me.
Come join Mastodon where the skies are bluer and the grass is greener.
I had a nice little profile on there until about a month ago. I didn’t delete when I saw AI spammers join. And I kept my profile even when the mods were starting to become reddit-ish. What sent me over the edge was when they announced a partnership with an AI company who said they were “just there to beef up security”. Yeah, no, not for me. Super sad, too, because Bluesky is a good idea, but I’m sticking with the fediverse.
it’s not yet federated properly, or would not be completely, but it’s still a good player in the game for now. I’ll advocate against it if shareholders start shenanigans.
I get the mentality, but that’s the problem with enshitification. It always starts good, but once all the twitter traffic moves over, and the world becomes dependent on BlueSky the way it still is for Twitter, what do they become next?
It would be better to push people away from the closed platform and towards the actual open platform.
Edit: maybe BlueSky is open source. In such case, if they start fucking around, maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community. I think until other instances gain tractions, it is hard to consider BlueSky comparable to mastadon.
maybe it would be simple to fork this source code and form your own community
The network effect makes this extremely difficult, even with the source code, it’s basically starting from scratch again.
The devs also made it clear that if ever bsky became crap, the system is made so that you could just jump over to another instance and go from there.
So far so good, but yeah I get it, the more they talk about investors, the more I’m reluctant to jump in fully.
Except they haven’t actually backed that up with a way for you to jump servers. If the central Bsky server goes down, it takes the network with it. Until they actually let other people host, it’s just meaningless posturing. Without a way for people to leave their network you are as captive there as you are on Twitter
There is a recent community project that focuses on federating Bluesky without the Bluesky devs’ involvement:
This would be good. I just hope it can do so while still being a part of BlueSky (as it is today).
It’s not a non-profit like Mastodon so, seems inevitable
My $0.02 from extensive cryptocurrency experience:
A centralized project with a user base never becomes decentralized later. It’s always a lie to get users quickly. Centralization generally just gets worse.
I think BlueSky will keep half-assing decentralization until their owners decide that narrative is no longer necessary.
Every time i’m amazed at how such authors are talented at avoiding mentioning Nostr 😏
