Technology

user-unfriendliness.

I can't really disagree with this, since I've personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I've got this reflexive skepticism since I'm an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can't speak to earlier times.) I think I'm probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.

I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can't *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?

Mastadon has definitely improved it's user onboarding process. When I first tried, and failed, to use it 3 years ago it was awful. Signing up a year ago was a painless process. It may not be fully ready for the mainstream just yet, but it's definitely getting there.

While I agree with you. I don't think Mastodon is user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.

As a brazilian, I'm now deeply offended that the ISO does not recognize brazilion as a valid amount

Create, Grow, Moderate, Sell, Repeat.

Is there any relation between Bluesky and Dorsey now? Does he own any of it?

are they federated with each other?

no. there's a sort of a third party bridge, but it requires an account on one platform to follow a bot in order to show up on another, so if someone on Bluesky doesn't explicitly do it and you're using Mastodon, then you're not going to connect.

Two competing federation standards. The VHS and Betamax, or Blu Ray and HD-DVD, of 2024.

Bluesky: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats Mastodon: https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

There isn’t a 1:1 comparison. But the closest comparison looks like Mastodon is on a bit of a decline at 800k MAU. Bluesky is roughly 400k daily likers.

Restricted to the whole site or just that user? The user tools are pretty powerful on their own.

Bluesky is built on an open source ActivityPub alternative called "AT Protocol". However, Bluesky itself is not open source* and afaik does not yet federate with any other software. The company is a "public benefit corporation".

From my understanding, Bluesky has good moderation, to the point where Jack Dorsey (the Twitter founder) condemned it and withdrew from the project. That's a big plus in my book.

• Another commenter pointed out that some parts of it are open source, such as the apps and at least some parts of the backend. Im not sure to what extent the backend is open source.

One is going down the drain first

The latter has been taken over by ElMu and his shenanigans, the former was originally a Twitter-internal project for a decentralised social media interfacing protocol, got forked out from Twitter in 2021 (the year before Musk took over Twitter), has a lot of Ex-Twitter people on it and promises to do a lot of things a lot better than either Twitter (now X) and offer a little more resilience against things like moderator abuse.

Curiously, that last bit is the first time I've seen a reasonable use case for Blockchain: Your content can be stored on arbitrary servers and migrated to others. Your identity is tied to keys that can be used to verify your content is actually yours. The info where the public half of the key and all your content are stored is recorded in a public, distributed, append-only ledger, where each entry verifies the integrity of the previous one. Thus, once you're registered on that, no single moderator can arbitrarily ban you anymore. (Pretty sure there's a hole in that logic, but I'm not versed enough to confidently assert as much.)

Of course, there's a caveat: To discover content, you need an index ("relay") of all the content feeds. That takes some of the content aggregation load off your individual content servers and makes hosting them easier. However, it shifts the content moderation / federation power from the individual instances to the shared index: If a given index blocks your content, people using it won't see your content.

In theory anyone can host their own relay and everyone can choose which relay they want their content feed to use. In practice, hosting a relay is resource-intensive, bsky have a solid headstart and probably more resources, and their app also obviously uses their own index by default, so if you do want to create a "competitor"/alternative index, you'll have a lot of catching up to do. They even state that expectation: "In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers" ^src^

Which is basically a small-scale version of Google and Bing (and the AT Protocol Overview explicitly uses that comparison): Sure, you can make your own search engine, but if Google is the default everywhere, has a lot of storage and computing power to serve more requests and has way more indexed content, why would people use yours instead? Thus, if you want your content to be seen by many people, you have to play by the big relays' rules.

Much decentral. Very open.

(I'm being snarky here, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt: They probably do mean to make self-hosting your personal data and content easier, and it's easier for custom feeds to use single, big relays to draw from rather than doing the indexing and collation themselves. However, it provides them with a lot of leverage and just because they call themselves a "public benefit corporation" doesn't mean I trust them not to start enshittifying for profit at some point.)