Mastodon isn’t a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.

Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.

the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don’t know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don’t give a shit

Wait people didn’t join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?

Frankly? I’m happy that they didn’t end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.

Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who’d spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That’s regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.

Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying “this is fine, this is how it’s supposed to be”. And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.

Someone might say “but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They’d behave better.” Well… we’re talking about a large horde of users, they’d be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.

Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word “cis” and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.

Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm “to suggest the users whatever they interested in”, less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.

Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.

Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.

normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software

Mastodon’s original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X

Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.

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.

Non-twitter is fine in any form.

Gotta disagree with you there when it comes to Threads. We have seen how Meta is also trying to influence global politics. Threads should not be encouraged either. On top of that, their privacy policy is a nightmare.

https://qz.com/threads-meta-delayed-launch-eu-privacy-policy-concerns-1850609340

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.

fedidb.org

They do not federate with each other AFAIK, Mastodon’s user base is in another user’s answer, Bluesky’s IDK except apparently one million more than before

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

Twitter allows porn now, no?

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.)

“Bluesky! You didn’t file your paperwork last night.”

If that ain’t the name of a New York police chief from the 80s with Polish heritage, I don’t know what is

Well not anymore thanks to cartridge sellers.

Brazilians make the best programming languages

Lake Feperd?

If you follow the AP bridge @ap.brid.gy there you’ll be fine.

It’s more valuable than Twitter and threads to me… It really is only missing video and I’ll be fully sold and hashtags seem to work… I just don’t use them often

From what I heard from a friend that’s pissed at losing access to xitter and begrudgingly made an account on bluesky, it doesn’t have trending topics yet, “How am I supposed to know what’s going on in the world?”