Bluesky is very barebones and has even less functionality than Mastodon. Beside having a similar look to Twitter I don't understand why people choose it.
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain, I had to try 3/4 time before I felt like I had enough info to make the correct choice, and then finding other users from my previous twitter gang was a pain, the barrier to entry is much higher than some other options.
Unfortunately marketing matters a lot. One single brand is easier to understand than the many federated servers of mastodon.
I wanted to check out where this reddit community migrated to some server with something lemmy. It said something about mastadon so I made an account to try to participate. It wasn't really clear to me lemmy isn't another mastodon instance, but a different protocol with some federated synergy. My fault, but the marketing is a bit confusing.
Same as me, I have tried to join mastodon like 4 times since it launched. To me it's still a ghost town with very little of value.
I've built a place I find comfortable, took a couple tries. But I have found decent content, found some of my friends from twitter, found replication bots for people I used to follow but not really interact with.
It's not twitter, but it took me 5+ years to build out my twitter. I think over time, enough people will join defederated social media that it can be a pretty good experience if a little too much work for many. But it will take a little time.
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain
What was there to figure out in your case?
Well, every instance has different mix of people interest and moderation. Which maybe I was over thinking it but it took a while to figure out where I wanted to be. And my initial experience wasn't great. My server was way out of date, had caching issues, was slow lots of defederation and perhaps arbitrary blocking that I didn't know was going on so I didn't understand why it didn't work.
I gave up and came back to a different server and it's been good since. But, no one is switching from threads or Instagram for that experience. Or at least going to stick with it long enough to find a home.
Step 1. Make people feel "excited" about joining by creating false exclusivity. (Facebook was originally only for college campuses)
Step 2. Drop the false exclusivity.
Step 3. Profit?
I honestly don't know either...
Bluesky wasn't as confusing as Mastodon
I'm so tired of this bullshit. I went to the mastodon.social; clicked the big button labeled "create an account"; read and accepted the rules; filled out a form asking for my email address, a username and password; confirmed my email; and could immediately post.
How the fuck is that confusing, that's standard fucking practice. Jesus fucked on a pike.
Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.
Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.
If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.
Yep exactly this. I'm pretty tech oriented and even I was confused about the concept of instances at first.
you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse.
How is this different than Twitter?
If you know the person's twitter handle, its simple to search for them. People coming from centralized systems, don't realize that you have to include the domain for fediverse searches to work. I couldn't just find you by searching for p03locke, I'd have to search for @p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Also, if my instance has never interacted with you, your profile probably won't show posts when I find you (though this is a choice and I don't know why implementations won't fix it.)
Again, instance blocks makes this more complicated because my instance could block yours or yours could block mine and that would prevent this search from working but the user wouldn't know that.
Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It's a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: "I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn't have all these layers of obfuscation."
It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that's maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing's stopping them, but that way their first impression isn't analysis paralysis.
To your other points:
for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.
I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it's Threads or Mastodon
Federation of a service is confusing because it is a difficult problem to conceptualize. There's no way to easily explain how to use federated services to non techies.
For me? That's fine. I can use federated stuff.
For my mom? Nope. But she needs to get off the internet in general so that's probably a bad example.
It's true. And people try to jump on to similar things. "It's just like how email works!", or "It's just like how international phone calls work!"
Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.
I mean, that's fair, but it's not relevant to usage. I go to mastodon.social, I sign up, I use. At no point is the concept of federation necessary in that process, that's for the owners/operators/maintainers to figure out.
If people want to know more, they will seek out that arcane knowledge, but it's not something someone who's just there to satisfy their FOMO ever needs to know.
It wasn't a {Join with Facebook]or a {Join with Google] button
Maybe ask the people what they find confusing about Mastodon, and listen.
I'll give you example. Say I want to sign up , but mastodon.social has currently closed sign-ups. People tell me I can just sign up on any instance, but there's dozens of them and they all appear to be the same. As someone who's not familiar with federated services, I don't know what to base my instance decision on.
How would you help me overcome this choice paralysis?
Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.
I don't get Mastodon
I'm the opposite though. I could create an account but I still don't understand how to be logged into other mastodon instances automatically and follow content
You don't get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you'd send an email. The server does the rest.
If your question is about finding people to follow, that's another matter. Folks on other instances won't show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that's usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just... follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don't have to "log in" anywhere else; that's the "federated" part of the fediverse.
What's most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It's as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that's the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in "World" can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.
Thx for the very clear explanation
Going from one billionaire's platform to another (Twitter/Musk > Bluesky/Dorsey) is not a smart move. There's a vast segment of the population that learns nothing and keeps making the same mistakes.
Dorsey doesn't own bluesky, it's a public interest company and it runs on the AT protocol, which is defederated and open source... like lemmy or mastodon
Jack doesn't own bluesky but he is on the board [0] and even working for a public benefit company, is supposed to [1]:
... operate the business with the same authority and behavior as in a traditional corporation
It does go on to state they're required to consider the impact of their decisions not only for shareholders but also employees, customers, community, etc, but there's no mechanism that forces them to do "the right thing". A public benefit company is basically a way to protect decisions made if they were to not align with the concept of "shareholder primacy" [2]. On the other hand, if Bluesky had registered as a certified B Corp [3], that would have more weight to it as they not only have to state their intentions but also provide evidence.
In regards to being federated - are they actually federating with anyone yet? Genuine question, I haven't kept up.
In regards to being open source, it's a good start, but like the Chromium project, the company's needs will drive it forward and the interest of the company will come first, good or bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
There's a vast majority of the population that doesn't care.
Not really interested myself: Never liked the Twitter-esque platforms to begin with, plus I'm pretty happy with Lemmy and Kbin.
Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.
Lemmy is great in the same ways (and better in some) in principle, it's just a scale thing that makes it more difficult to obtain that "build your own experience" effect like Reddit has. There just aren't enough people right now to support the super idiosyncratic stream of content that you can curate with Reddit.
My advice is to just lean into it. Start with Ubuntu or Mint, queue up The Next Generation season 1 on your Jellyfin server, and keep contributing.
I prefer Stargate on Plex and praising the Lord with TempleOS.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to Lemmy having more niche places: That was, hands down, my favorite thing about reddit. I don't really care much about following people, I prefer to follow subjects..
Speaking of niche communities, I'd like to take this opportunity to plug !micromobility@lemmy.world
Agreed
I just don't think I know how I'm supposed to "properly" use Mastodon. I just see 80% US political discussion, which is fine, but my broken zoomer brain just gets worn down by it very easily.
With Lemmy/KBin if I get bored with a topic, I can just switch over to a different community/magazine.
They could have opened themselves when twitter went downhill. They missed this opportunity window Threads took advantage of.
Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.
OTOH, having said that, I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you're not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.
I just realized
BS = Bull... ehrm BlueSky
I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.
Lots of reasons:
A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.
For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.
I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn't replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn't harmed me in the least to use both. It's actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.
I'm not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn't, I've still got Mastodon to fall back to where I'm pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.
I’m on the other side, why use either? Microblogging seems quite dated and the format is not conducive to conversation. I prefer Lemmy style posts and comments to microblogging.
Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.
I’m on the other side, why use either?
Microblogging is a great format for following creators. I don't need your life story to know that you've got a new album, a new software release, a new security vulnerability, a new video, a new tour, or a new comic. The shortform communication forced by Mastodon or Bluesky is perfect for that. It gives enough room to share those quick updates, and that's about it. Replies are also kept succinct which makes parsing those for relevant context or side info similarly simple.
I originally got into Twitter because it was the update channel for when new Cyanogenmod releases dropped and I stuck around because following the right security professionals made it so that I could learn about a new CVE within seconds of its filing rather than having to wait for a news site I visit to catch wind of it and write something up. Which in turn made my job easier because I knew what systems we'd need to be patching well before that info bubbled up to my bosses so I could already have a head start on the work before the ask reached me officially.
These days, microblogging (at least with a straight chronological follow feed) more or less achieves what RSS used to back before everyone suddenly decided about a decade back that it wasn't worth maintaining an RSS feed without Google running Reader or some crap. By way of example, ~20 years ago I had 13 comics that I followed via my RSS reader, today only 5 of those creators still have RSS feeds and a couple of those seem like they're on life support for how they seem to infrequently pause updates for a few days at a time. All of the RSS feeds that are gone have moved to microblogging of some sort for updates, and I'd rather they use something open than the likes of Twitter (which I left at the first whiff that Musk was buying the place) or Instagram (which I have never used because it's Facebook and I don't do Facebook.)
Let’s not even get started on how stupid people sound when they talk about skeets and toots.
Yeah, I'll agree there. I call them posts wherever they reside. It's what they've always been, it's what they'll always be.
I'm still hoping that ATProto will one day federate natively with ActivityPub. It's very possible, and there are already relays doing it.
I think I'll stick with Lemmy, Kbin, and a bit of reddit, never cared for the Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky style of website
Reddit is so shitty to use. My desktop doesn't let.me get to because it says they don't allow VPN. Which I don't have on. I think there's an option to make an account to get access...
And the website on mobile is so slow and unintuitive.
Every search I used to make was with site:reddit.com but I just stopped because I can't make it in the site.
I didn't expect it to get that bad.
For whatever reason it has been more successful attracting Arabic speakers than the fediverse.
I'd wager invite-only versus network effect. Early adopters have more opportunity to shape the emerging community. There was no rush of standard American dorks to homogenize the place.
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