I keep seeing people make this argument and I think we all need to realize that different people use social media in different ways.
I moved to Bluesky as well. It’s where my friends went, it’s where the artists and authors I follow went, it’s where some of the bigger names I care to keep up with went.
Feels a little gross, I’m not gonna defend Bluesky or anything, but there are more reasons for the choice.
Sure, and I’m not asking to beat anyone up over it (I’ll share my strong opinions elsewhere). Just seems strange to reap the benefits of decentralized social media on one hand but turn around and centralize on the other.
I get the “social circle moved there” argument, since that’s what has kept a lot of people using Xitter, despite the toxic atmosphere.
I do have a mastodon account but have not found myself using it very much. Bluesky just does a better job of replicating what I liked about twitter. Mastodon seems like it was designed by people who had a bunch of problems with how twitter worked and wanted to implement their own different version of a microblogging platform that unfortunately kills a lot of the virality and “one big chatroom” vibe that made twitter so fun. Lemmy does a much better job of replicating what I liked about reddit.
I think the issue (and blessing) lies in the fact that there’s no algorithm. People are used to the various centralized platforms serving them content by default through whatever algorithm decides what should be relevant.
Mastodon, however, is self-curated by design, so there’s no algorithm but you to craft your feed. You won’t see anything you didn’t opt-in to seeing, whether that’s following an individual account, a tag, or an entire instance. Boosting and tagging are also core components that replace the “random post to try out” of the algorithm and implement human intentionality instead.
Bluesky, on the other hand, necessarily has to drive engagement to stay profitable enough to operate, so you will see things in your feed you’d like and things you don’t (because rage farming is effective). Mastodon, on the other hand, has no goal of profitability.
If you want that “giant chatroom” vibe, you can absolutely get that by doing things like following tags for subjects you like and following individual accounts from there. I know you said you went to Bluesky already, but if anyone ever wants to switch, you can get that old Twitter vibe with a little intentionality.
I think that’s a reasonable description of the difference. Algorithms are very valuable tools for surfacing content that I will be interested in but didn’t know to seek out. No matter how many people I follow on Mastodon, it won’t be able to replicate having new interesting people and posts served up to me like that, nor the resulting vibe of everyone seeing a lot of the same viral content.
I started a Mastodon account before bluesky even existed, tried to get into it, was still trying when I got a bluesky account, and then was beat over the head with the superiority of bluesky despite having more of an ideological affinity for the Mastodon project. I still have that account but would be surprising if I started using it more, since the issues with Mastodon are pretty baked into the underlying design.
