Fediverse

Not a lot. Simpler signup flow and ecosystem, more twitter-like timeline and features, better discoverability and some communities that aren’t on Mastodon. FOSS diehards can mince about it all they want and blame idiot users, but the simple fact is people who don't live and breathe technology still have lots to offer a social network, and Mastodon continues to alienate them in design and in community. Lemmy does too.

I like Mastodon and Lemmy, a lot. I prefer them to the alternatives. But I just signed up for BlueSky and I’m enjoying it a lot even routed through the Mastodon bridge, simply because there are more diverse communities there, whereas my Mastodon feed is 90% tech and dev people despite spending hours and hours hunting for people I used to follow on Twitter. Getting big App.net flashbacks.

Artificial scarcity (invites) and VC funding

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 enthused

Features-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^[or subdomain]. 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.

Look, on Mastodon you have to pick a server. That's just too hard to do.

That's why email never took off.

Users.

An advertising budget

I hate gatekeeping so much, but what I'm about to say is going to contradict that statement so much I should probably stop typing and start this post again....

Anywhoo....

If a troglodyte can't figure out how to sign up for the fediverse, then they should stick to CorpoChat

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.

An artificial scarcity model which gets people excited over the chance to join diet twitter.

It creates that "one big chatroom" vibe from old twitter, while Mastodon feels like a bunch of people microblogging next to each other

If you go on Bluesky they will tell you. Lots of people saying that they feel isolated because there is no algorithm feeding engagement, and federation doesn't lend itself to finding your friends from Twitter easily without one of those migration tools people were using. Then another chunk describe Mastodon users as a "HOA" because someone told them to put a CW on something.

I think emulating twitter was a huge mistake for mastadon, the twitter reply structure that makes it difficult to have a long conversation with multiple people to be the main part of the post but ideal for "dunks" and outrage farming. I think the Tumblr reblog structure would have been an infinitly better choice for the more actual socialising thing fediverse is going for and a small user base that isnt producing much content and can re-circulate older posts. also it's less image-centric allowing more posts to be stored on a server, additionally (intuitively, I haven't thought about implementation that hard) it seems like a much more natural fit for federation.

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.

As much as people may not like to hear it Ease of use from being one centralized platform is a big factor

Just login and be done with it

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.

dril

A cult leader in Jack Dorsey

Portable accounts and being able to add third party layers to your feed for moderation and sorting algorithms. At least that's their design goal, idk if it's actually implemented because I never got an invite after like half a year.