Fediverse

Mastodon is a pain in the ass to get signed up for anyone under room temperature IQ, so, like, most of Twitter's users, even the ones smart enough to leave.

People like simple and easy to use.

Bluesky got that, fediverse in general don't have that.

57 different 3rd party apps is probably a good start. Mastodon has to be easy to on-board and it isn’t for someone with no technical understanding what domains, servers or instances are. To that group Bluesky makes sense. You are signing up for Bluesky. Try to onboard that group to mastodon and they don’t understand if they are on mastodon.social or mastodon.world or any other instance.

Why would they be on one of those fringe services with less users than bluesky? That’s what a non expert understands

I think it’s much more difficult to find people to follow. I personally struggle a lot, and will likely either gave up the micro-blogging system or try another platform. It was great on Twitter before Musk bought it, but since I left, I have yet to find an alternative.

Simplicity.

Can you guys help explain it to someone completely inexperienced?

I had Twitter but only used it for following music venues to see upcoming events and bars for happy hour updates. I have a Mastodon account but only played with it for a few minutes because i didn't really get it. I don't understand following a person. What can one person have to say that i would care enough about to download an app. What am i missing?

I have a friend who has had a mastodon instance since it was gnu social, and there are two reasons I stopped using it.

First, the UI sucks. He installed 3 or 4 different skins and they were all barely usable. I don't want or need something flashy, xfce is my favorite windows manager, but it needs to at least work and not be confusing.

Second, the people suck. It went from being okay to by the time I left I don't think I was seeing any exchanges that didn't have antisemitism or racism.

I don't know. But one potential advantage of bsky over mastodon is the data and real account migration capability between instances.

Also bsky is run by a company and overall infra is better than most community instances of mastodon, so people will see better performance and more ad/pr visibility of the platform.

Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.

All those federated platform will only become popular if the backend is dumb and the frontend is smart, i.e. you create your account on a frontend but can use the same credentials to connect via another frontend and no matter which frontend you connect to, all content for the platform is accessible to you, there's no admin having control over your experience, only people offering different UI experiences. Federation/defederation/deciding to host NSFW content, that's all taken care of behind the scene just like on Reddit, for the user they're just using Lemmy via frontend X or Y and they decide what communities and users they want to block.

Because people will choose convenience over their vey own survival. Also, in this case, they apparently don’t see a problem with leaving Twitter because it’s MAGA to join BS which is backed by MAGA money. Convenience über alles. Ethics be damned. I’m fine with people like that not joining the fediverse.

Americans love to pretend they are cowboys. In reality they love centralised power and bureaucracy. They are deeply afraid of each other so they flock to platforms that pretend to be for freedom, but is actually highly regulated by centralised power. That’s why they love tech-oligarchs that pretend to be self made geniuses. It allows them to fantasise about freedom to succeed and submit to power at the same time.

I'm sure a certain percentage of people can't spell mastodon.

Because most people don't exactly want a community-led social platform that respects you and empowers user freedom, even if some say they do.

Bluesky is promising a Twitter-like experience. They promote their ties to the former Twitter, and promise algorithms, dopamine-inducing "reach" and "engagement", paid subscriptions, some degree of centralized control (primarily of the network's infrastructure), and a for-profit VC-funded company, all under the guise of federation. They claim a mastodon-like brand that they are yet to deliver.

Star power. High production values. Less complex (appears to be more centralized, immediately easy to conceptualize as "twitter but not right wing")

I wrote an article on this last night.

https://aidanraymond.medium.com/why-bluesky-isnt-the-alternative-to-x-formerly-twitter-you-re-looking-for-and-why-mastodon-is-46c8901f2748

I never post, but I do follow a couple of channels on bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky always just works. Mastodon breaks all the freaking time.

Because you install the app, make an account, and use it and now it has more celebs I guess.

What is with all these wall of text answers guys?

Twitter people like Twitter and Twitter man for making it. Twitter now not Twitter is now X and no more Twitter man. Twitter people not like TeslaSpace man. Twitter man make BlueSky.

No elephant needed to make this story work. Remember: twitter brain cannot handle too many characters.

Two words: Nomadic identity

I tried bluesky (bs?) for 5 minutes. Clicked one thing, saw the comment "Sunsets are my love language," and realized that these are not my people.

Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.

The platform has 57 third party apps.

The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.

Are you asking about "people" or "nerds"? People prefer Bluesky due to its simplicity and momentum. There are more popular outlets using it. If you're assuming that People would prefer the complexity of the Fediverse and instances, if you think People know what a decentralized community run server is, you're a "nerd" (for lack of a better term, I'm sorry).

The battle has always been the same: Windows v. Apple, Android v. iOS, SMS Twitter v. App Twitter. Some people prefer flexibility and investing time in making things work the way they want (Nerds). Some people want an out of the box product that's well designed and efficient (People).

Fifty Seven Third Party Apps is not a selling point - that's called anxiety inducing fragmentation. Some people want to walk down the grocery store aisle and choose between 57 options for toilet paper and some people just want "good", "better", "best". The reality is that most people just want to be told what to do. They have too much shit going on in their lives to care about "decentralization".

Mastodon will never challenge well financed closed or semi-open platforms. As it's designed, it's apparent it never intended to. It will continue to grow at a slow rate as an alternative. Hopefully, the fediverse is realized and you can choose to host your own server and gain access to other social platforms.

The reality is that this stuff costs money. In the near future, you'll have the same three choices with social media as we do with other services: ad-subsidized, subscription, self-hosted. Anything with ads is going to have an algorithm. Anything with a subscription is going to have a board of directors. Selfhosting comes with a steep learning curve.

It's because of the connotation with an overrated metal band of the same name.

/s for the overly serious