I'd say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you're not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I'm sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They're not doing it for your benefit.
That said, I've come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I'm expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.
It's all cyclical anyway. No social media company will reign forever. We've already seen a number of them rise and fall. It's kinda like how different civilizations gained and lost dominance throughout history.
I'm still on the fence about that...I think it'd make more sense for many to drop social media and opt for their own site with RSS feeds. A lot of social media for some is little more than a noisier RSS reader. Sometimes even literally with those with auto-playing videos. 😬
I run a few bots on Bluesky and absently check it occasionally on a personal account. Anecdotally I can say that I'm seeing a lot more engagement even just over the last week.
I'm on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.
It's a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon's integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn't scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.
Mastodon is scaling fine though? I've been using it for years, and it's great, and still growing. User base is a bit tech focused, could be more general, but I think it'll get there eventually.
If there's one thing a social media site loves, its a drama increase.
It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.
Honestly, more than anything, it feels like an indictment of Threads. That was supposed to be the big party spot for creatives, journalists, and D-list celebrities following the burn out of Twitter. But modern Threads just feels like the worst kind of Hype-House crossbred with LinkedIn.
BlueSky feels a lot more like a vintage '00s social media site, which is all people really wanted. Hope it survives its own popularity better than Twitter did. But for now, life is good.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ""federated"" in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there's basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it's an irritation.
The biggest thing that valve did that kept them in everyone's good graces is that steam's core functionality hasn't had any major changes in years. Dare I say, more than a decade.
It's a platform where you buy games, download them, and play them.
In the early days you still had to deal with all the bullshit, including third party launcher installs and crap to get things going, and over time, valve simplified all of that, making it easier than ever to take advantage of the core function of steam: buying, downloading, and playing games.
Literally the only improvement I can absolutely, positively credit them for, is making that entire process, easier, simpler, and quicker, than ever.
Sure, you can chat to people, track achievements, comment on your profile, comment on your friends profiles, buy and sell cosmetics on the market thing, even voice chat and I think they have a way you can stream your game to friends.... Not sure on that last one.
It's like Facebook, FB marketplace, FB messenger, discord, Twitter... And a bunch of other services, all huddled together to make a bastard child with the entire PC video game industry.... That's steam.
But the core mechanic that was always the main reason why steam was great, remains the same.
It's a lot of art, cats, and big tiddy cartoons. I haven't found anything too onerous in its UI, the community has a somewhat toxic level of positivity but that's certainly better than the general toxicity of most of the web these days.
The federation architecture allows anyone to host a Relay, though it’s a fairly resource-demanding service. In all likelihood, there may be a few large full-network providers, and then a long tail of partial-network providers.
Isn't the only thing that really matters decentralised control?
Open protocols and APIs seem pretty meaningless to me if there's a single point of control for the brand.
If everyone migrates to bluesky and then bluesky says "of we're not doing that open thing anymore because of this new embiggened thing we're doing" everyone will still be on bluesky.
i installed it while i was bored in a doctor waiting room, thought it was the dumbest most pointless thing ever. deleted after 5 minutes and went on with my life
I deleted Twitter as soon as Space Karen took over.
However, my friends and so many people I follow on other platforms still link their Twitter profiles. For some there needs to be something solid to make a real and consistent migration. I was overly hopeful that Threads (yes, another evil) would have buried Twitter.
Threads stood as much chance as Google Plus had against Facebook.
Zuckerfucker using a somewhat similar strategy to artificially boost Threads membership (login with instagram once, you can't delete your threads account without also deleting the instagram one) speaks volumes.
we've been seeing these "twitter's in biiiiiiiiig trouble now!!" headlines for how many years now?
this time it's for realsies.
yet people refuse to just delete it
Many journalists want to feel connected, and since many politicians have a presence on Twitter, they feel like they can't. That means Twitter gets referenced way more than necessary in news stories, which feeds its popularity.
I honestly don't think twitter will ever go away until all of a majority of all major sports teams and leagues, a majority of legislative body members, and major news and wire services have a sustained and active presence on bsky. it right now is literally coasting on everything that made it useful pre 2022 and every stupid fucking thing elon has done to make the twitter experience worse hasn't done enough to cause a critical mass of people to jump.
once you see major popular twitter accounts like rex chapman, mark hamill, taylor swift and the like (and I say this not because of their politics but because of their massive follower base) regularly post on bsky you can probably start closing the book on twitter.
I've deleted it ages ago, but another friend that actually knows and cares about the insanity of twitter still refuses to get away from it because "it's where the kpop community is", nowhere else. It's fucking sad.
Now that is an interesting target to get tons of people off twitter. If all these K Pop labels like Hybe and JYP suddenly started publishing on BlueSky their fans would immediately follow suit
Just wait until enough sane people have left Twitter; it'll then implode and the fascist Nazi shitheads will migrate.
They don't want an echo chamber- they want to be able to shout their slurs and right-wing bullshit at you while you can't respond. It's exactly why places like Voat and that shitty T_D knockoff crashed. Once the ratio of right-wingers to non-right-wingers on Twitter hits a critical amount, they'll start looking for other places to infest.
Yeah bro I wish they would keep to their own echochambers so they can become more and more radicalised and end up causing even more harm in the long run rather than at least having some if minimal exposure to normal fucking people /s
I haven't seen any toxicity on the server I'm on (https://mastodon.gamedev.place ) either. But I've seen people I follow complain about it in the past, and I trust them. Especially considering they left for Bluesky.
I think Mastodon users are more technical and blunt, drawing from the same stereotypes that people have (often fairly) thrown at nerdier people. We just need to keep that in mind. And maybe a good ad/explainer, given how many people bounce off the concept of federation and different servers.
I remember putting in so much effort into my MySpace page… and then it was replaced by Facebook… and I had to start over. That’s the only reason why people are staying in the shitter…