I’s heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it’s just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.
And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I’ve come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.
This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.
(To be clear, I’ve never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I’m asking specifically so that I don’t have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)
Edit:
Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that “federation” there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon’s federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don’t and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky’s overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
“Everyone is joining BlueSky so now i am too i guess lol”
I doubt anybody knows what Mastodon is.
Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn’t give a fuck about federation, yet it’s the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.
I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you’re flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.
Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven’t implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.
Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter’s original founders.
I think the problem is Mastodon makes it hard to find people to follow. I can’t even find mainstream media official accounts, let alone an actual celebrity. The discovery features need to be improved.
Meanwhile on BlueSky I instantly see every major news outlet in my main feed.
For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.
Problem with that is that is catering to a certain set of people while ignoring a whole larger user base that Mastodon could appeal to.
Maybe you just arent the main target and thus be more suited to Mastodon rather than BlueSky.
I can’t tell for BlueSky because I have not joined yet, but I did create a Mastodon account months ago and I’m not sure what to do with it or how to interact with others. I find it confusing.
On Twitter I was mostly following a bunch of like minded people, liking their stuff, and I could see what they liked too. But on Mastodon there’s uuh, boosts and favorites?! I’m not sure of how it works or what I’m doing. I can’t just “like” posts? I have to boost them?! I found the people I liked that were on Twitter, but on Mastodon I feel like there’s nothing I can do aside from seeing posts and it’s just not attractive.
Boosting is retweeting. Favoriting is liking.
There is no algorithm spying on you across the web and recording your actions and behavior to try and force you to engage with an automated sub-optimal content stream, you have to manually curate your own (hopefully optimal) content stream, which you then engage with. That’s basically the difference between Mastodon and the rest of them.
Two things I don’t see anybody saying:
- BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn’t won by having a better product, it’s won by convincing people they should buy your product.
- Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that’s just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn’t have like a 90% miss rate.
I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”
Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.
The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.
For me it’s that more people I wanted to follow are now on blue sky but I have both. I have been liking the community on blue sky a little more.
I never used twitter though so what do I even know lol
The absolutely delightful feature that you can use block lists, where you can block all of the MAGA trash with a click and effectively silence them from your life. The ability to collectively silence them is golden.
Probably easier for social graph exploration TBH, it’s one of Mastodons main handicaps.
tried to register on first mastodon instance that popped up. couldn’t because I have a Russian email. that summed up my experience.
I can’t stand all the edgy fascists on mastodon
That’s not something I see on masto but maybe I’m missing something
I have been on Mastodon almost daily for 5 years, and I’ve got absolutely no idea how you have found “all the edgy fascists” on there. I mean sure, if your only experience is on truth.social i expect you’d see that type of content and nothing else. But besides truth.social, I don’t really know where you’d manage to dig it up. Must be hard work lol.
When Mastodon launched i tried it and there were almost exclusively edgy children whining about how they couldn’t say the nword anymore while saying the nword
That was easily 70% of all content and i can’t use a site that refuses to moderate its users
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”
Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.
So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Yeah that’s another thing, Mastodon is kinda nice, except for its userbase. :P
Honestly?
I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?
Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).
And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.
My interactions on Mastodon are far fewer than on Lemmy, though.
IMO, Lemmy is like a CoOp video game where you’re supposed to interact together, and Mastodon is like watching someone else play a solo video game.
Both can be good, but they serve different purposes to me.
I think thats by design. Microblogging vs Forums.
Ths former, like the bird app is to yell into the void and hear what others yell while lemmy and reddit is built around it’s comment sections.
This is exactly why I never got into Xitter or Mastodon. I’ve tried them, but it’s a lot of work sifting through stuff to try to find somebody you want to follow. And newsflash, I don’t find many people that interesting that I want to hear what they say repeatedly.
Whereas forum style I can more easily find content I enjoy, then also possibly enjoy the comments as well.
Neither is right or wrong, it’s just a different approach to online engagement.
I kinda used to like twitter to find related stuff to my interests and content creators in a more digestible form than sifting through subreddits, but nowadays its nigh unusable.
I mean, Lemmy is basically a big discussion forum to share links or get an argument going. You’re obviously gonna get more confrontations.
Bsky/Mastodon/Threads is strangers yelling their thoughts into the void in between posts about their cats or pictures of themselves. Not exactly a place where most people will go in with the intention of dissenting.
And yet?
Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.
Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.
redditors are the fucking worst.
You literally cannot search for Mastodon without getting a weird ass 2-paragraph manifesto about The Fediverse.
End users just want to use shit.
A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.
And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.
It was major human infrastructure failure.
And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.
The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.
The difference is that you won’t find yourself unable to send an e-mail because the admin of your e-mail server doesn’t like someone from the recipient’s e-mail server.
No? There are a lot of mail providers that are listed as spam on other providers „just because“. So yes, that literally does happen.
I mean, that is a possible thing for your e-mail admin to do. They just generally don’t.
Why not?
Because it’s virtually never a thing that happens.
I see you never had to jump through the hoops to get Gmail to not silently drop all your emails.
That is a completely different issue.
Well, you know that by desing wassap, telegram, etc can communicate with each other but they intentionally cut that feature to only be able to menssege server internally?
You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.
☝️ This. It’s why I put off signing up for Mastodon for a long time, even though I am a big supporter of the Fediverse.
Felt the same about Lemmy when I signed up.
The only reason I actually wound up signing up on Lemmy is that there is one “main” instance by appearance, and it lets you participate in others(?). (Lemmy.world)
You don’t need to know any of the more esoteric stuff to get going.
Is Mastadon different?
I don’t know, I use BSKY.
Lol, fair enough.
Hint: https://mastodon.social/
I already have BSKY and am not currently interested in picking up yet another account for something but thank you
Just pick an open one, that’s the easiest choice. No essays, no worrying about being denied, easy.
You’ve stated this at least twice in this thread. People aren’t like that, just in general. Heck, I understood it and still had trouble picking a server for Lemmy and mastadon.
Do I want a single topic or domain to define me? Will a small server have popular posts? Will it have popular people? I can’t find this popular account because I’m typing in username instead of user+domain.
I created and deleted at least 5 before I gave up and just picked one. Is that what most people would do?
I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think you are not putting yourself in the shoes of most users who want to follow a celebrity or a train station or space agency and can’t even find their account.
I’m sorry I wasn’t entirely clear, BIG server, with open sign-ups. The complaints about finding people aren’t really valid when we have big servers like this one or mastodon.social. Such servers have the best reach and the easiest onboarding. Pick those.
There are at least three viable commercial microblogging sites right now. So you already have all these problems, without even considering the Fediverse. The Fediverse is the SOLUTION to these problems, not the cause.
This, when I decided to join Mastodon I was prompted to choose a server and had to research which one should join and understand how it works.
It is called UX friction and is well studied in sign up and checkout processes, the more steps the user has to perform the more likely it abandons it.
Just pick one, you’re thinking too hard. I just picked one that’s open because I didn’t want to write an essay about myself to prove my worth and get someone to accept me, because I know that there isn’t any reason why anyone would accept me over someone else (I’m a nobody). I hate the idea of someone else having to review my worth before being allowed to sign up, what a disgusting concept. “Oh it’s to stop spam 🤓” All the other sites have been dealing with Spam good enough without asking me to prove my worth to them, maybe the Fediverse should take some pointers from the big boys at Big tech, they seem to be doing better than you are when it comes to this.
Eww no, I definitely don’t want them to take any pointers from big tech. Their anti-spam methods are way too restrictive and invasive to your privacy. I don’t want to give my phone number to websites just to sign up. And I cannot even view Youtube videos or Instagram posts because they are blocking the IPv6 address of my 6in4 tunnel which I need because my ISP doesn’t have IPv6 yet. I have to sign in to “confirm you are not a bot”.
Your example with YouTube is not an anti-spam measure, it’s them trying to restrict and create exclusivity with their content, they’re just lying and calling it anti-spam. I think it’s better to have some annoying automated spam defense like Reddit and the gang does than it is to be judged on my worth and denied because I’m not interesting enough or meet some dumb criteria to join the exclusive clubs Lemmys are slowly becoming fuck that.
How is picking a Mastodon server different from signing up for email, finding a discord server, signing up to follow channels on youtube, and so on. Somehow people have no problems figuring those things out, but when it comes to Mastodon this is constantly brought up like some insurmountable challenge.
Having to make an informed decision is a barrier to entry. it took me a while because I wanted to make sure I didn’t join (and waste time/effort) something I didn’t align with.
You don’t have to make an informed decision. Signing up for an instance isn’t a blood pact. If you find the instance you singed up for isn’t to your liking, You can easily migrate your account to another. Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587
You don’t have to make an informed decision.
Correct, but you are still presented with a decision that adds friction to the onboarding experience. I was aware of how Mastodon works and that I could migrate and it took me a while to create an account because I didn’t want to “waste my time”. I can’t imagine a regular user being prompted to “select an instance”, decide to go with the first one they see, and registration is either closed or invite only. That’s a huge barrier to entry compared to being forced into a single login that is always open.
Meanwhile, if you’re worried about something you don’t align with, then you don’t even get that choice with a centralized platform like Bluesky. For example, I don’t align with any of this shit https://toad.social/@davetroy/113476788536250587
100000% agree with you. I would never create a bluesky account because of that. Unfortunately people aren’t as informed and most really just don’t care.
What I’m saying is that the amount of friction this adds is completely blown out of proportion. It’s just not that hard, and people acting like it’s a huge barrier are not being serious. If this was the case email would’ve never taken off. The fact that we’re at the point where it’s hard to imagine a regular user going outside a walled corporate garden is really the problem here.
Unfortunately people aren’t as informed and most really just don’t care.
The flip side is that we shouldn’t care too much either. Fediverse already has millions of users, and it can just keep growing organically at its own pace.
Email has taken 25 years to get people that comfortable with it, and most folks either go with their ISP email, or one of 3 or 4 providers. Discord, you’re already in the tech savvy population.
Yet, the fact remains that people did get comfortable with email, and even the least tech illiterate people are able to use it.
I agree with you, but to be fair, people don’t really choose an email provider. They chose gmail, because anything else is disallowed by everyone’s anti-spam measures.
That’s a recent phenomenon though, and it’s effectively been forced on people by the largest email provider making it difficult to use others. My original point was that people didn’t find it confusing to register for different mail providers when that was easy to do.
That definitely makes a difference, you can choose which but by default it already selects one so some people won’t even change it for convenience, however, that’s not a thing on Mastodon so… Also, a lot of those are mobile users and BlueSky has a lot more Twitter-like familiar UI than Mastodon apps (maybe I’m wrong and if so, point me to which one because there are so many… there goes another issue and convenience out of the window for people who just don’t care about searching and wants something to be done quick - so basically most of Twitter users that still didn’t leave it or went to BlueSky)
You have to pick a microblogging service. What’s the difference? Truth Social is just a mastodon instance, but it’s commercial and it has marketing. That’s all that’s “missing” from any other fediverse instance, and thank fucking god.
I’m on both Mastodon and Bluesky. To me, Mastodon’s biggest problem is its refusal to have an algorithm to surface popular content. Yes there are problems with algorithms, but I don’t have the time or inclination to read every post in chronological order. A good algorithm would show me popular posts without manipulating me for profit.
Edt: a few people have misunderstood me. I’m not proposing “Mastodon shows me stuff from people I don’t follow,” I’m suggesting “Mastodon shows me stuff only from people I follow, but it shows me the popular stuff first.”
Problem with algorithms showing popular content is that once you have them, you’ll have people trying to use them to make money. And by extension people trying to manipulate you for profit. Doesn’t have to be the platform itself doing it for it to be harmful.
Of course, but good luck getting those 5% of users that actually produce nearly 100% of the content to move over if their business model cannot work. And once those move, you know where all the people following them move.
I don’t really think mastodon needs those 5% to produce content to entertain and advertise a userbase of 95% lurkers. For me it’s definitely a bonus that they’re not there - I don’t need influencer-shit in my feed.
If that kind of content creator and passive user goes to Bluesky that’s fine. If they went to mastodon we’d just see calls for an algorithm, which would be directly against what I want in the platform.
Yeah being manipulated by algorithm is a problem. The best solution I can think of is Mastodon adding the ability to choose your algorithm. Not just a list of approved ones since the admins could manipulate that list, but the ability to actually upload some code so you can either write your own algorithm or choose one written by someone you trust.
That comes with a lot of problems like potentially overworking the server so I don’t know if it’s actually a viable solution but it would be nice.
As a layman, I promise you “write your own algorithmic code” is not a feature that would compel me to sign up for a service
I was thinking along the lines of being given a list of popular algorithms, but if you find an algorithm you like on another instance you can copy it over to your instance. So it is not necessary to write code and nearly nobody would do it, they would just use ones that other people created.
But I realize this is an extremely difficult request so I’m not really serious when I propose it.
I think it would be an awesome feature but like you said, just not something that is going to sway a typical social media user to give it a shot. But I can see it being a really cool way for advanced users to really customize their experience.
Oh yeah this has little to do with the original question about why bsky is more popular. This suggestion of “let people write their own algorithms” is for the devs who think algorithms are harmful. They aren’t harmful if you give users the power to choose their own algorithm. Techie people can write the algorithms and non-techie people can choose them. Chances are a few algorithms would eventually become the most popular and very few would be written after that, but the point is you let the users decide instead of the Mastodon devs having to write the algorithms.
And now I realize bsky actually has something like this: Custom Feeds. If I understand correctly, they get around the “running untrusted code” issue by not running the code on bsky servers. Instead whoever wrote the custom feed gets the data from bsky, runs the algorithm on a separate server, then returns the custom feed. Pretty clever. https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/custom-feeds
I’m inclined to agree that’s a problem. Everyone’s first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.
Exactly, a lot of algorithms on for-profit sites are manipulative trash but refusing to have any algorithm at all is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Exactly I had difficulty finding content and any “guide” or anything I seemed to find was too confusing or not practical for me. I don’t use Twitter, blue sky, or mastadon regularly but when I checked them all out, blue sky was the best in all round; “Ease of use” and “easy to find content”
That sounds more like a feature than a bug. I remember when Twitter was actually useful. You could sort by “new” as the default and your feed only included stuff from people you followed. And then it went to complete shit with the sort defaulting to “fuck your preferences”, sponsored content and your feed being littered with click bait, paid content and all the other bits of enshitification. And that is all built on the algorithmic selection of content.
I didn’t say it was a bad thing, I just said it’s one reason Bsky is more popular. People are busy and want algorithms.
To me, Mastodon’s biggest problem is its refusal to have an algorithm to surface popular content.
Isn’t Explore - Posts on the desktop web client exactly what you’re looking for? It was always there and it’s where I spend most of my Mastodon time.
It looks like that’s popular posts by anyone, not just by people I follow. So it’s a start, but different people want to see different things so having a single firehose like Explore doesn’t really meet the need. For me, I want to see popular stuff by people or hashtags I follow. Other people might want to see other things.
Yes, that’s true. I am under the impression that “the algorithm” on the popular platforms mixes in posts from people you don’t follow. The only one I was somewhat familiar with was the Twitter one from when I was there.
thats the entire point of mastodon.
literally why it was built. Edit :
It’s not supposed to be a place you go to get served content. You pick who you follow, and that’s your feed.
The problem has been lack of adoption by popular news and culture . So you go there, and you cannot easily find high volume content provided like the bbc, nfl, Real Madrid, Activision, etc etc
We get that it is the design philosophy for Mastodon to not have an algorithm serving content, but it appears to be a non-starter for a lot of users of Twitter like services.
In theory, a third party could write that algorithm and implement it in some form. Truth Social functions like that, but without federating to the rest of Mastodon.
I think people are misunderstanding what I mean by algorithm. An algorithm could show you stuff from people you don’t follow (yuck), but it could also show you popular stuff only from people you follow. That used to be how Facebook did it.
There’s a trending posts list which helps fill this want for me.
The lack of an algorithm is a solution. Social media tends to be too addictive to the point it can be harmful to humans, so Mastodon was intentionally designed to be less addictive.
I didn’t say refusing to have an algorithm was a bad thing, I just said it’s one reason Bluesky is more popular.
Algorithms makes me less addictive because it always suggest the same type of boring content
Oh, that’s interesting. Lucky you, I guess. The algorithms have been tuned to be as engaging as possible, and that seems to be working for most people. Obviously, it’s impossible to make it work for literally everyone, and you seem to be one of the few who can escape the algorithm.
This is a great commentary to me. I think it shows just how much of an appetite we currently have for a curated space. It’s almost like Mastodon is a service that’s about 15 years too late.
I remember going around to older forums and sites looking for specific content when I wanted it, and I wasn’t always guaranteed to find something I liked, but I would often see something interesting.
Now, though, I really want anywhere I go to knock me off my feet with good content because that’s what I’m conditioned to. Isn’t that what makes me an addict, though? I’m wondering if that chance of dissatisfaction isn’t a virtue to ensure no one platform takes control of all my attention.
I think using hashtags with filters serve the same purpose
But it still won’t put my friend’s popular posts at the top, right? I don’t want to scroll past 20 pictures of people’s dinner and then find out one of my friends got engaged, I want the “I got engaged” post at the top because it’s probably getting the most interaction.
People expecting a new Twitter when switching to Mastodon were met with weird behavior and nerds who told them the awful search function or weird comment count is working correctly because that’s how federation works. Well if that’s the case then federation is shit.
This is unfortunately the world of open-source.
- Nerd tells you to use the open-source thing.
- Non-technical tries it and asks questions
- Nerd proclaims it’s not a real problem/your fault/not applicable/fix it yourself
- Some company takes that open-source version or idea, makes it easier for end users and monetize it
- Nerd gets angry and repeats step 1
Source: I am nerd and I contribute to open-source.
