Have you ever heard of the term federation-washing?
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.
Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon,
I’m so tired of hearing this. Just click the mastodon.social button in the app and it’s not any different.
I’ve been on Mastodon for two years now. I’m active and all.
And yet, to this date, I still can’t find a single person in my working field, who are located within the province of Quebec.
Bluesky? Found and added over a hundred, in mere days.
Not setting up an account, that’s roughly the same. Adding contacts by topic, blocking topics and people with bad agendas en masse, etc. I started my Mastodon account almost a year before Bluesky. In Bluesky I had something useful in a week. In Mastodon I still don’t (and it’s not for lack of effort).
Wouldn’t that mean everyone is centralized on the same instance? I don’t use Mastodon so I don’t know if it’s the same as here…
I’m probably an idiot, but my experience was exactly the opposite. I don’t really feel like following specific users (at least for now), I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.
I never used Twitter, and am not particularly excited about the general format, so I’m probably not the target user, but I check Mastodon occasionally, and gave up on Bluesky after like 2 days.
On Bluesky you follow starter packs which are collections of users which go to your main feed. https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
Or you follow feeds which are set up by users to track certain topics. These can be very highly customized follows of people, hashtags, keywords, crowd tagged topics, including blocks of certain stuff. These are like subreddits or Lemmy communities. https://blueskydirectory.com/feeds/all
I just want to follow hashtags. Super easy to do on Mastodon, but I couldn’t figure it out on Bluesky.
BSky is just a little different, and I would argue superior, in the way discovery works. Instead of searching for hashtags for a subject (which can easily be abused) you search for feeds of the subject, which are far more useful. Then if you want, you can combine multiple feeds.
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.
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.
