Is it just the momentum and word of mouth, or are there improved features as well?
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Artificial scarcity (invites) and VC funding
Funding from the Vietcong? Interesting…
Concerning…
Voice Chat
like shooting fish in a barrel
Forgive my ramblings, but here’s the main differences I see, from a community perspective:
Bluesky’s for people who loved twitter circa 2015
Mastodon’s for people who loved the format but hated the way the platform made use of it. The community is FOSS-focused and anti-corporate.
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate, but they still want their social media to be on a single platform and tend to dislike federation
Mastodon folks tend to be in smaller circles and more tech enthusedFeatures-wise, Mastodon kills the algorithm in favour of chronological timelines and lists, while Bluesky embraces algorithms, allowing people to even make their own algorithms for the platform. Bluesky’s AT Proto uses “DIDs” to identify users, which are associated directly with a domain[1]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub’s @actor@my.domain.com.
Federation’s still not enabled so I have no clue how things will look and feel on that front, nor am I familiar enough with the protocol to make any claim about how versatile it is. ActivityPub is flexible enough to be a Twitter clone, a reddit clone, a blogging platform, a youtube clone, a twitch clone, a goodreads clone, or several other formats. AT Proto’s currently only proven to work for a Twitter clone.
or subdomain ↩︎
I would argue that most Bluesky users don’t necessarily dislike federation, but rather have no idea what it is, or what the larger Fediverse is.
Someone I’m in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.
He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.
It’s not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn’t that interested by what he saw so didn’t stick with it - to each their own
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate
Bluesky is a for profit company with a crypto person as the CEO and Jack Dorsey on the board so good luck to them I guess
Oh ya, no, 100%. The company is still a for-profit corporation that needs to make ends meet come the 31st. The userbase is what I’m talking about there, and specifically their unprincipled stance wrt corporate control, in paying lip-service to hating corpos, yet wanting everything to be structured around a centralized entity and team who makes it easy to blame someone (1) for anything that goes wrong.
Like many cases of “success” lately. A well connected and rich parent.
An advertising budget
It really comes down to this. So many time’s I’ve discovered a cool FOSS project years after it’s existed simply because I hadn’t thought to search for it. Imagine if Linux had the advertising budget of Microsoft or Google. The “Year of the Linux Desktop” would have arrived in '99.
This aspect is one thing that makes me optimistic about the fediverse. A communication platform without ads and where the spread of information is dependent on network effects and word of mouth, means that it’s much harder for a company to force themselves in front of everyone at once using dollars.
You can just click Follow and start following someone. You don’t have to perform a copy-paste dance to bring the username back to your instance and do the following there.
In the Mastodon app you can just click “follow”. Since BS doesn’t have a web interface at all, it’s probably safe to assume that this is not a major reason a BS user would avoid Mastodon. Since they’re not on desktop anyway.
EDIT: Disregard me BS apparently has a website now so maybe the copy-paste reason is why?
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Thanks didn’t realize that, edited my comment
I only use Mastodon as a desktop website.
Wasn’t that fixed - or at least ameliorated - in the newest upgrade of Masto?
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The process got easier in mastodon 4.2.0, now you just have to type in your instance and it takes you to it directly.
Who wants to type anything?
A megalomaniac owner
Are you referring to Jack Dorsey? He’s not the owner, he just gave them grant money in the beginning. It’s a non-profit so technically no individual “owns” it.
Mastodon is nonprofit. Blue sky is for profit.
You’re right about the Dorsey part.
Wait - are you sure it’s non-profit? If so, why the VC money?
No, he’s wrong (obviously) it’s a for profit startup.
It’s not currently making money but that’s different than nonprofit obviously.
He’s right about the Jack part though.
He’s endorsing Kennedy so yeah there’s that hot mess.
ew gross
oooh i stand corrected anywho that makes me more anxious to try it if they would just send me my gd invite that i requested like a year ago ;__;
Bluesky is to Mastodon & ActivityPub, what Matrix is to XMPP/IRC… a completely over-engineered system, ignoring all well established international standards and run by a for-profit entity with venture capital funding.
that actually explains why i find matrix so annoying, thanks.
And when the venture capital runs out, they will need to turn a profit. And the cycle of enshittification will continue.
Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have. I don’t think you understand how the Matrix protocol at works, and I assume you are blindly repeating what you read online that XMPP must be better because it supposedly has less lines of code, though I’m sure you didn’t check that either.
I hate to inform you that I know the insides of both pretty well and run both myself on my server and have evaluated the differences extensively 🤷♂️
Oh and:
That’s awesome, and I still know that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But damn you made me a soyjack, that definitely tells me you’ve actually looked into the technical differences.
Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.
On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.
On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.
The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice https://atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.
Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.
My money’s on BS never federating at all. Mastodon Instances are communities unto themselves. The way BS is set up means an “instance” is essentially just free additional hosting for BlueSky Inc. It’s decentralized similarly to how crypto is decentralized. Of course, what else would one expect from Jack.
Jack is a techbro in it for the money. Why anyone trusts him with BlueSky is beyond me.
For real. It’s not like Twitter was markedly different before Elon.
- No HOA complaining that you didn’t CW a picture with eye contact or food or alcohol or matter
- More witty people from X
- No drama about who is defederating with who
Which instance have you been on?
My instance is great, although I wish we would switch to glitch-soc so we could have instance-only visibility on posts. I don’t really see much inter-instance drama and I generally don’t get harassed by people who think I need to post a certain way (maybe because I’ve been on Masto since 2018 and they have been on less than a year?)
But those are still legitimate problems for a lot of people.
cupoftea.social says hello :wave: runs on glitch and has boosts in the timeline.
I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can’t deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.
See, that’s exactly why I like Mastodon and want nothing to do with Bluesky. Sounds like we’re both happy this way.
That’s fine, I just want either of them to actually kill twitter for good though and it just doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Mastodon. With Threads potentially joining the Fediverse, I guess who knows.
You’re not missing much. I had a BlueSky account for all 2 days before deleting it. Literally people begging for follows and clout chasing non stop. It’s just twitter again with all the garbage that comes with it. Mastodon is far far far FAR better.
Agreed 100%, it’s tiring and redundant. I know it’s important, but constantly reading the same issues over and over ends up in a big “ugh”, I need some good shitposting and porn/hentai to balance it out and Mastodon doesn’t have it for some reason
A place where normies can feel at home, knowing that they won’t feel out of place not having a fursona or favourite Linux distribution and won’t be scolded for not using alt text or some inadvertent picoaggression. Also, the promise of clout.
What? The constant wave of fury porn and Linux propoganda spam isn’t what people join a social media platform for?!??!?
A corporate daddy. Social media users LOVE a big corpo dom.
Easier sign up. On BlueSky you can just sign up for an account and go. You don’t have to worry about picking an instance or anything like on Mastodon, which can be a bit off-putting for someone not familiar with federation.
It’s ridiculous how much Mastodon advocates downplay this.
I strongly prefer Mastodon over the alternatives, but the onboarding experience is BAD for the average user.
Onboarding to Mastodon is actually identical to BS/Threads now. They’ve made huge improvements. It’s a shame that most of the news media’s experience discovering Mastodon for the first time was in Oct '22 because it’s left a bit of a “techie” aura around the whole thing they’re still trying to shake off. If Mastodon was then where it is now, I don’t even think BS or Threads would try to compete.
For a while now, the app has been really easy to sign up on, and now the website is the same.
FYI- Signing up and following people on the Mastodon app now is literally just as easy as it is on BS. All the Federation stuff is hidden unless you want to look for it. It’s very nice.
Isn’t BlueSky still on an invite system?
I’ve been on the waiting list for months now, at least there are Mastodon instances with open registration available.
Want an invite?
A cult leader in Jack Dorsey
Tho I agree with all the comments I have to say the general vibe of bluesky is more playful and fun compared to mastadon, perhaps its just my bias. But just like lemmy generally feels like a nice place to be so does bluesky- the vibe feels inviting.
I’ve got an account on Bluesky and I’m not sure if I agree. Like 90% of the posts I’ve seen on there are about Bluesky itself, there wasn’t really anything beyond that.
Well small new platforms do have a lotta posts about themselves, lemmy isnt new but is still full of posts about lemmy
Yeah, if you can get past all the posts about Reddit. Lemmy users mostly spend time bitching about Reddit, Apple, and Microsoft. It’s exhausting.
I generally agree, but I felt like Bluesky was on a whole different level.
And 90% of posts on lemmy seem to be about reddit…
Have an invite?
No i’m sorry
I do. DM me.
Note: I only have 1 available right now.
I DMed let me know if kbin/Lemmy messaging is broken.
It must be because I got this comment, but not a DM. I’ll try to DM you.
Edit: I tried to send a message but 403 error. :/
Well that’s ridiculous. Had no idea that wasn’t possible til just now.
I can post the invite code here, but you’ll have to be fast lol. Let me know
