Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.
Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there’s an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.
FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don’t think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren’t things I could’ve figured out or worked around, I just didn’t feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they’ve smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I’m happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.
There’s an add-on to help find the people you followed on Twitter on Bluesky, FYI.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sky-follower-bridge/behhbpbpmailcnfbjagknjngnfdojpko?hl=en
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sky-follower-bridge/
Meanwhile, I’m technologically thick as shit and have no trouble using Mastodon at all. If I know someone is on there I’ll find their profile and follow them. Done.
It ain’t that complicated.
It’s important to note that my experience is from a year ago, and I imagine a lot has changed. Part of my issue at the time was that I couldn’t see things like who people I followed were following because they were on a different server, which made discovery challenging. Also very few people who I followed on the bird site went to Mastodon.
I’m not saying the platform can’t work or that the barriers make it unusable, just that the draw wasn’t there to warrant the investment in learning a more complex platform than the alternatives.
If there are these roadblack to you as a profficient computer toucher then I think it’s safe to say this is system is already doomed to cultural irrelevance, at best just another one of our private clubhouse nerdtoys, sad !
Hopefully this defeat in the face of bluesky shocks the dev out of their uncompromising complacency and start fighting FOR the users
It’s entirely possible that my timing was just bad for Mastodon and good for Lemmy. The fact that I could jump on Boost and have an extremely familiar experience was a big plus. Bluesky was more similar in terms of migration experience to Lemmy than Mastodon was.
The other issue is that in a forum site you follow topics, where on a microblog site you follow people. The topics are here on Lemmy (to some extent), even if the people aren’t, but I don’t really care about the individual contributors as much. The people I wanted to follow for microblogging went to Bluesky, and that matters a lot more there.
Your initial post and response here describe my position as well.
Simply put, to follow individuals, you have to be where those individuals are. On Lemmy here in looking for topics and discussion, those are much easier to decentralize.
yea in the beginning it can be hard. Just start following people. And get your timeline filling. Try to check out other users posts/comments and follow them as well if you want to. So you get started.
That was actually part of my issue, and I experienced the same problem on Bluesky at first. The difference for me was ease of discovery and the influx of people I followed on other platforms. If they had gone to Mastodon instead, I’d have been more inclined to give it more effort. As it stands, I’m content with Bluesky and don’t feel I’m missing much on Mastodon. Perhaps I’m mistaken, and that’s my loss. Just trying to add some perspective.
We need those cracked TikTok algos which keep children glued to their screens for 16 hours a day
