I's heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it's just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.
And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I've come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.
This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.
(To be clear, I've never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I'm asking specifically so that I don't have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)
Edit:
Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird "federation" tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that "federation" there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
~~The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.~~
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon's federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don't and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky's overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were "Get an invite and make an account"
Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said "Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn't really matter what provider you have". Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say "Just make an account on one of these four or five instances". And, like clockwork, someone would "well ackshually" me and insist that people can't use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.
So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn't need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.
Yeah that's another thing, Mastodon is kinda nice, except for its userbase. :P
Honestly?
I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?
Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for... most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster...).
And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren't talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be... while the rest of us are actually being a community.
I mean, Lemmy is basically a big discussion forum to share links or get an argument going. You're obviously gonna get more confrontations.
Bsky/Mastodon/Threads is strangers yelling their thoughts into the void in between posts about their cats or pictures of themselves. Not exactly a place where most people will go in with the intention of dissenting.
And yet?
Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.
Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from "How dare you have a different opinion" to "I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that".