His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.
I don’t use Mastadon cause I don’t care for micro-blogging, but nevertheless, I like this.
Why is there this very loud chorus of people touting bluesky as alternative to twitter instead of the far superior Mastodon?
Bluesky you are basically swapping a tyrant against a benevolent dictator, that dictator can become corrupted or sell bluesky to Musk Elon later on… That is not a solution that is more like procrastination.
Because BlueSky has designers and Mastodon is a nightmare for new users. Same reason a lot of “superior” open source apps never take off. Devs are rarely also good designers. Until we start caring about normal people it will stay that way.
Nightmare is massively overstating it. Mastodon’s UI/UX is neither a nightmare nor difficult to use. People who say this stuff leave me scratching my head.
In my view, the only legitimate criticism of Mastodon is about the lack of an algorithm that’s constantly bubbling content to the top, but that’s a valid design choice that many people prefer over the toxic algos over at X/Twitter.
Bluesky has the USP of people being able to choose from multiple algorithms or even use multiple ones at the same time; and that certainly has resonated with a lot of people.
That sounds pretty neat. Are all the algos developed by Bluesky (i.e., corporate/billionaire/VC-driven) though?
no, but the various algorithms that control and construct these “user customized feeds” is precisely the part of bluesky that is architecturely a bottleneck, and it isn’t a bug, the ceo of bluesky has gone on record that bluesky hasn’t ruled out using this intentional centralization point to force ads on the system
Good to know, thanks!
No, anyone is able to create a “feed”
Cool, thanks.
Apparently not nearly as many people as those who prefer Bluesky’s approach.
Most new users want to easily see feeds related to the things they’re into and that’s objectively more difficult with Mastodon unless you already have a list of accounts to follow. I want Mastodon to succeed and grow but it won’t if it only caters to tech heads.
Sure, this is legitimate as well, and I believe I’ve heard that they’re working on this feature.
Genie’s out of the bottle now though. The casual-attracting features needed to be in place before twitter exploded. They weren’t. Bluesky’s were. Casuals don’t care about what-ifs or principles, it’s a miracle Musk let Twitter get so terrible that the casuals even noticed. It’ll take a monumental event now to get the casuals to switch again from the blueskys they just made and got invested in.
I hear what you’re saying and think you have a good point. It’s very likely that Mastodon will stay a minor player, but I also think it will live on as a viable alternative to the major social networks. There are a lot of people dedicated to developing, running, posting, etc. to keep it lively. There is also the factor that Mastodon will always be there if (when) X or BlueSky stumble and make a mistake that will send another chunk of users over.
This is a good point. Success isn’t a zero sum game here and maybe the era of giant social networks is changing to smaller communities again.
I’m not sure I would go as far as saying that the trends are tipping toward smaller communities again, but we can hope.
There’s also just the naming problem. Social media works best when its name sounds like a place and its verbs sound like normal actions. Mastodon is a three syllable elephant (or a metal band), versus a sky or a book (note: this isn’t a hard and fast rule, since Twitter and Instagram pulled it off). And they call their posts toots. Officially, too, unlike the user-made meme of “Skeets”. Toots are farts. No politician or business professional is going to say “retoot” with a straight face.
I don’t think either of those are major issues. I happen to think that Mastodon is OK, almost catchy. Their mascot is very cute too. They officially did away with the Toot terminology quite a while ago, like a year or two, but some instances modified the code to keep that, and the old hands keep calling it that too. Also, keep in mind that I said that I fully expect Mastodon to stay a minor but viable player. It’s never going to overtake a corporate behemoth like Meta, and most likely not even Twitter.
Is this actually true? The UIs don’t seem very different to me. What is it about mastodon’s design that’s bad?
Just the UX rather than the UI. It’s also missing some features like quote tweets. But it can be confusing to onboard either your own instance and know that your discoverable or to join an instance and know how discoverable you are.
Like I am a career man in IT, servers, and networking. I have no idea if I were to run my own instance, who exactly on the network would be able to see my public posts
I think the lack of quote tweets is a feature and not a bug. They facilitate a lot of antisocial behavior on other microblogging sites as I recall.
Anyone who is on a server that houses any other user that follows you. Not that hard to find out…
But also I don’t really see how that matters in practice for most pleb users, since 95% or them will join a large server, which means the practical answer is “nearly everyone on the fediverse, if they want to”.
That part I understand, but how can I get those first followers? And if I am just going to join the flagship instance, why wouldn’t I just join bluesky since it has more users.
Just trying to give a reason why people might shun mastodon for blue sky, this isn’t supposed to be a real argument against Mastodon. I’m on it and love it
Follow people and hashtags and interact with them and you’ll get followers. I barely post, just a few replies a day, and I have over 800 followers. I have a pinned post on my account to that effect.
I would join mastodon over bluesky because bluesky seems to be on the same mesh it to fixation trajectory as any other VC backed social network. But yeah, I get that most people won’t see that for another couple of years… Oh well. At least people are bailing twitter. And when bluesky goes to shit mastodon will still be there, and the rationale should be a lot clearer.
That sounds like a convoluted method of self promotion, almost like SEO fake engagement, just to be discoverable. And if everyone on the network had to do this to be discoverable, how can I trust the discovery methods to find people worth following?
And if the cross instance discoverability has these kinds of hurdles, then the promise of federation isn’t going to pan out.
At least with Lemmy the nature of the platforms, users following a smaller universe of potential communities, makes each community much more easily discoverable for people who don’t necessarily want to be active posters. Mastodon’s user-focused follow is much more limited in seamless federation.
You don’t have to promote yourself or be fake at all. If you reply to people and they like things you say, they or others who read it may follow you. Often if you follow someone they’ll follow you back–but that most likely depends on you having put some info about yourself in your profile so they can get an idea of who they would be following, and even more likely if you’ve interacted with them before.
Since there’s no algorithm, hashtags are big on Mastodon. By subscribing to some you’ll find people to follow and interact with. Also, a common way for people to find and follow you is to write an introduction post and pin it–include the ‘introduction’ hashtag plus hashtags of your interests. That way when people search for hashtags they’re interested in, they’ll find your intro post and may follow you. And whenever you post about something you want to have more reach, put a relevant hashtag or two at the end of it.
An app I use for Mastodon (Called Mona) allows quote toots.
As someone who had never used corporate social media like FB and Twitter (for my own reasons), when I found out about Mastodon back in 2017-18, I decided to join it because of its philosophy and it not being a corporate-owned walled garden. It has its flaws of course. But since I didn’t have any preconceptions, I mostly liked Mastodon as it was and didn’t find it confusing at all. That’s probably because I read up on Mastodon first to decide whether I’d want to try it, so I knew what to expect.
So I can understand how people who had been using Twitter and had their expectations shaped by it would assume that Mastodon was just a Twitter clone, not having learned anything about it beforehand. That’s why they were confused and disappointed to find that it was its own thing with its own philosophy, and had existing communities aligned with that philosophy.
Some (not all) of those who saw the differences as flaws, complained that Mastodon was crap for not having certain Twitter features, and some (not all) existing communities didn’t take kindly to demands that Mastodon abandon its philosophy and transform itself into a Twitter clone, so there were conflicts as well, and those new people didn’t stick around.
OTOH, many other new people found that they liked the different philosophy and those people did stick around, so Mastodon has grown. But IMO since most people like the Twitter-style algorithms and “broadcast/consume” culture (as opposed to Mastodon’s more personal interaction culture), Mastodon will always be a much smaller thing. But its existence is an important and good thing, like the quiet room away from the riotous street party, where you can hear each other speak.
I also joined around 2017, but I was using twitter beforehand. Totally agree with everything you’ve said.
I do think that mastodon could benefit from some simple, transparent/open algos (not black box ad-focused ones), such as the ability to sort replies based on favourites, and a per-hashtag recently popular view. Some of those are already requested and maybe on the cards.
imho: UX-wise.
a: marketing, the name Mastodon is not in common usage, at all… it’s named after a (very cool) metal band… i love it, but your avg chap will hear “mastodon” and wrinkle their nose and move on in the sea of infinite new apps that are shinier… i think this hurt Diaspora a lot as well… at the end of the day, it’s a social network and people have to actually talk about it…
like, regular schmoe’s who don’t love new words have to drunkenly say at a bar “hey add me on ____” and bluesky is so so much better for that.
… remember, regular sports bar types need to say it to each other… grandma’s in nursing homes need to be comfortable with it.
“federated” is a big word and concept, but still the best word for it… after decentralized….
….
b: probably bigger but Jack Dorsey is kinda touted as this super moral tech luminary, even though he quit bluesky for centralizing, he still added a lot of weight to that critical mass a social network needs to achieve to be useful at all.
….
c. actual UI: trying to tag a username and instance is pretty cumbersome… on twitter or insta or most things, you can type @username and tag anyone, on lemmy it’s not as big of a deal because it’s little forums organized around posts, instead of posts organized around users… on a microblogging or friend-network thing like diaspora, it’s just not easy enough.
like, granny in the nursing home isn’t going to type !sonnyboy@dopemastonny.federaloo.org… or get all that….
if you don’t abstract all that away, regular users will be afraid and you’ll get mostly techies and people ideologically motivated to join….
and of course, most of the ideologically motivated ones will take bluesky as close enough… especially because it’s gotten big enough….
More UX than UI. The entire on-boarding process is hard on Mastodon. Who is on there? How do we find them, etc. it’s all rather nebulous. BlueSky has been innovative with some of their ideas. Things like starter packs are simple but greatly help new users get going. It’s shocking other social networks have not thought of them.
Mastodon has an early days of Twitter feel to it.
Someone (probably bluesky) almost definitely spent a large sum of money on marketing/astroturfing for Bluesky
Bluesky has jack dorsey, Twitter founder, in its DNA. Dorsey cheered musk on and they call each other friends. Bluesky is not the win people want it to be, it’s just a bandaid for your conscience with the same infected wound under the surface.
bluesky has more funding for self-promotion.
Because Bluesky has a marketing budget.
“We need to get away from these billionaire-ran social media sites! Ooh, a new billionaire-ran social media site!”
Same with the people who fled reddit and set their communities up on Discord…
What makes you assume Mastodon is superior as a solution for the people who are flocking to Bluesky in droves?
It has more features, and most people don’t know why Mastadon might be better. The average person doesn’t even know what a server is.
Mastodon has far more features. What it doesn’t have is centralization.
What features?
Lots of little things that add up. Some of the better include temporary muting, hashtags, and hashtag subscriptions. Plus it is resilient with no single point of failure.
I’m pretty sure Bluesky has hashtags. Subscribing to a hashtag and muting someone temporarily is nice. I think the main feature Mastadon is missing is discovery algorithms. Most people use that heavily on social media, whether they admit they value it or not.
What is this, then? It’s on the front page of a Mastodon server before you log in and afterwards the discovery section with posts, hashtags, people etc. is on the search page after login. Bluesky was far harder to get a decent feed going on till people started building lists (and those are pretty flawed in that you only follow the individuals - not the list - so it doesn’t update for subscribers).
Oh cool, I didn’t realize they added that. I tried Mastadon a while ago and couldn’t find anything interesting. I don’t use any micro blogging apps.
Bluesky has had a very fast development cycle and now already has features it didnt have 6 months ago. Mastodon’s main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version. There are features on their github ready to be merged in for 2 years and when asked, no one on the development team was able to find out why it had not been merged.
Bluesky’s main problem IMO is how it is fundamentally a profit driven venture that cannot tolerate slow and steady growth and how fundamentally, no matter what anyone including the CEO says, Bluesky must and always will unflinchingly support the interests of its investors over the interest of its users, period. To really spell things out here, the continued employment of anyone at Bluesky is fundamentally predicated on their ability and desire to do this very thing.
Bluesky is a business, after all
Considering the people pushing bluesky are the same ones usually praising government surveillance, I don’t trust it for one second. Smells like a psyop honeypot.
Can you show me an example of that? Of the people pushing Bluesky also praising government surveillance?
The Washington Post published a guide encouraging and teaching users how to migrate to the platform.
But don’t take my word for it. Jump on and look around. It’s as crowded with neoliberals as Truth Social is with Red MAGAs.
Kinda depends on what you’re filling your feed with. Mine is filled with naked gay men, and I’m pretty pleased with that.
But do the naked gay men have an exhibition fetish, especially by government agents?
Do a bunch of men who post nudes on the internet in a very public forum for free have an exhibition fetish? The world may never know…
I’m just trying to extrapolate to being supportive of government surveillance, and proving that other commenter right.
And I was ignoring your point since it’s not as if the government is going to draw the line for surveillance at Mastodon.
You can’t pry people away from their AI algorithms
You just got the answer in the headline and you answered yourself.
Chris Titus on YouTube had a decent break down of some the technical points he liked more about it.
At least this provides more time for mastodon to become better for even wider use. Hopefully bluesky wont go to shit too soon.
Your u/n pretty much sums up the delivery of your comment
The sad fact is that I will follow the writers and creatives where they migrate to. William Gibson moved to Bluesky so did I.
Russian talking points already filtering down to the average user.
Mastodon’s interface creates a self-selection bias of more technically inclined people, and is too dissimilar to twitter for the average user to want to invest time in learning it.
I keep hammering this point every time this is brought up, PR and NAMES matter! BlueSky is a nice non threatening name, Mastadon is an awful name for an app. It sounds way too close to mastrubate.
Lol, I guess we all make different connections, but to me “mastodon” doesn’t sound like “masterbate” any more than “blue sky” sounds like “blue balls” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯