Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
Because none of those points matter to the average user.
Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)
When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.
Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.
At least for Japanese users, they want to see content they love from creators relevant to them. Creators = illustrator, comic artist, photographer, cosplayer, writer, etc.
Creators want a stable platform that allows them to widen their reach and potentially making more money.
Mastodon at the moment are tend to be hostile against creators that wants to monetize their work. Not to forget, the creator you want to follow are on defederated or blocks your instance for random admin drama.
But hey, at least fediverse software like Misskey actually trying to serve these community. Like allowing community ads (like promoting indie comics, vtuber, or social event) and trying to be stable by resolving any potential instance problem together with zero drama. Misskey community also often have tendency to “decoupling from Western tech supremacy”
Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.
I remember the “big movement” when Twitter turned into a right wing cesspool.
At first, the biggest problem was that there were TWO main alternatives: Mastodon and Bluesky. So those who left split into two groups, ending up with a dead timeline, missing out on news. (I and my “bubble” use it to keep up with Covid vaccines, politics, safety etc.)
I joined the Mastodon group, because it solves the problem of a single crazy billionaire potentially buying & enshittifying it. But I fully admit that it is not user friendly at all. People who are not in IT just want it to WORK, like Twitter used to. They don’t want to “educate themselves” about servers, fediverse and networks. The user experience clearly hasn’t even been a thing. It’s techies writing software for themselves. What it needs is a full analysis of the experience from the start: Who are you, user, why are you considering Mastodon, what are your expectations, what are the experiences in the first 30 seconds after entering “mastadon” (oh, you misspelled it?) or “twitter alternative” into a search engine, etc. “pick an instance” is already the passive-aggressive demand nobody wants to hear.
In the end, my instance was shut down without a fair warning, all the reconnected and new contacts lost, no option to move. Trying Bluesky now, but many stayed at Twitter (now X), moved to Mastodon with or without success (most onto my dead instance), or gave up on microblogging.
I think we need something simple again. I remember what SUSE did for Linux in the 90s. Linux users were all like: Only debian is even somewhat useable, but if you should really do LFS. Non-techies willing to switch for “political” or other reasons were hit in the face with “Pick a distro!!!”. SUSE has been called “the Windows among the Linux distros” by those people, but it did the right thing. It provided exactly the simplification we needed: “This is Linux, you simply buy it on CD in a retail store like your other software, you run the installer.” It was a good thing.
IRC is the one good old thing that still works great. When they tried to enshittify freenode, we just moved, collectively. Many non-IT channels & servers died after 2010, though.
I don’t know. But one potential advantage of bsky over mastodon is the data and real account migration capability between instances.
Also bsky is run by a company and overall infra is better than most community instances of mastodon, so people will see better performance and more ad/pr visibility of the platform.
Because most people don’t exactly want a community-led social platform that respects you and empowers user freedom, even if some say they do.
Bluesky is promising a Twitter-like experience. They promote their ties to the former Twitter, and promise algorithms, dopamine-inducing “reach” and “engagement”, paid subscriptions, some degree of centralized control (primarily of the network’s infrastructure), and a for-profit VC-funded company, all under the guise of federation. They claim a mastodon-like brand that they are yet to deliver.
Because most people don’t exactly want a community-led social platform that respects you and empowers user freedom, even if some say they do.
Get off your high horse. I work for a software company, regularly participate in beta testing and am very tech literate. Mastodon was agitating to use when I signed up and not intuitive. The community I signed up in also deleted my account during a “whoopsie”. A terrible experience drove me off with no desire to go back for such a tiny and relatively stagnate user base on an unstable platform. If that was my experience, the average person will absolutely not like Mastodon.
Your complaint is about an unknown instance admin committing a maintenance mistake. Will bluesky’s promised federation protect against that? You could join an instance managed by a well funded public entity if you want something that gets close to VC-funding. (which aren’t that reliable either. Look how many of these start-up platforms go away)
See this is part of the problem.
Dude was like “look at this objectively terrible experience I actually had”
And you are like “yeah well that could happen to bsky in theory too, so they’re just as bad!”I’ve been a mastodon user for almost 2 years, but I never use it because finding interesting people to subscribe to who are actually active is difficult.
I haven’t been using bsky because I’ve really been hoping mastodon takes off, but whenever I hear about how easy it is to onboard and find interesting content, I think about switching.
People want a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. They want Twitter without Musk.
Bluesky is a 100%, 1:1, perfect clone of immediate pre-Musk Twitter. It is Twitter without Musk.
It looks exactly like Twitter, it feels exactly like Twitter (both the Web interface and the official app), and it’s for tech-illiterate dumb-dumbs.
Only recently has an instance selector been added to the sign-up process of the official app, but Bluesky still markets itself to its users as the self-same kind of centralised monolithic silo as Twitter and Facebook.
Mastodon has a vastly different UI and UX from immediate pre-Musk Twitter, but people don’t want to learn anything new. And truth be told, I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon.
Also, Mastodon advertises the fact that it’s decentralised with lots of instances to choose from, even though the gGmbH would rather want everyone to be on mastodon.social. This freaks people out.
Joining Mastodon is actually no more difficult than joining Bluesky in practice because the official app railroads everyone to mastodon.social without forcing them. But people won’t know until they’ve actually installed and opened that app.
The only reason why Mastodon grew so quickly to such an enormous size in late 2022 was because it was the only alternative to Twitter that anyone knew, including those who pulled Twitter users onto Mastodon. The only other advantage it had over anything else was that, unlike Twitter, it didn’t have Musk and uncontained droves of Nazis. Had people been sent to Akkoma or Calckey instead of Mastodon, it would have exploded the same.
Inb4 “How can people use e-mail then?” That’s because everyone’s on Gmail, and many think e-mail is a proprietary Google product.
Well lots of offoces used Microsoft for email and out sode i workd email is password reset, receipts, and new account confirmation. When the last i sent and email that wasn’t work or those things? About 8 years ago.
But yes tryings to explain instance and federation to a regular user is only going to confuse them. We need mastodon to be a sample as login and use. If we bring up a single tecnical term we lose people.
I never post, but I do follow a couple of channels on bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky always just works. Mastodon breaks all the freaking time.
What exactly breaks?
Idk the webpage doesn’t load, or i get some kind of weird error, or it seems to load but the persons profile shows they have no posts. Refreshing after a minute usually fixes it. But bluesky always loads faster in FF mobile and it seems much more reliable.
That has never happened to me. May I ask which instance you signed up on? I’m curious to try signing up there myself
Msdn.social, that’s where my account and the person who’s profile I look at are
msdn.social gives me ‘server not found’
I honestly can’t wrap my head around how to use Mastodon. Idk how to search for things that would interest me.
I’m just glad Lemmy exists.
Two words: Nomadic identity
First, Bluesky’s nomadic identity isn’t worth shit if nobody knows that there’s more than one instance.
Next, it has yet to be proven to work because nobody has daily-driven it yet.
Finally, if you want nomadic identity that’s actually proven to work, don’t join Bluesky. Join Hubzilla. Nomadic identity, established in 2012, some four years before Mastodon, daily-driven by probably hundreds or thousands of people since then.
I’m not even kidding. The Fediverse had nomadic identity four years before it had Mastodon.
install mastodon
Pick an instance
Hit up all
giant penis
That’s why. That’s the reason.
but you could review the instance beforehand…
Is Jimbo Normalman going to review the instance beforehand? Lmao.
There’s a high amount of friction to get people to join the Fediverse. I had to put in more effort than I’d like to figure out how things worked.
My biggest worry was picking the wrong Mastodon instance and then having no easy way to migrate my stuff to another server. Even after you pick your instance, there’s so much setup for things that you kinda just expect to work.
Are you talking about a Bhutan instance lmao!
This article gives a good view from an average user’s perspective.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
For most people that’s a complication, not a bonus.
Because centralized services are easier to use.
I’m running my own PDS on the AT Protocol 🤷♂️
This exactly. I didn’t join Lemmy for a long time, because I would search for “Lemmy”, get confused when I see a page asking me to “pick an instance” instead of seeing a front page, and then leave because I thought that they were all independent from each other.
It wasn’t until reddit killed my favorite app that I finally decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
To paraphrase my opinion from back then:
- Easier onboarding, and a familiar, easier UX
- customizable feeds you can subscribe to + starterpacks instantly give you full timelines and people to follow (and followers, if you’re in many starter packs)
- better discoverability, and therefore higher engagement
- stacking moderation and excellent security features (e.g. detachable quote boosts, “the nuclear block”)
- many users who tried Mastodon first had bad experiences with “HOA”-like behavior and over-enthusiastic mods
Personally, I’m excited there’s a decentralized option that’s super popular. Yes, relatively very few run their own PDS, but if the main bsky instance becomes a problem for anyone, people can easily migrate.
It’s not just data ownership either; The AT protocol supports community-built algorithms, relays, and app views.
I wouldn’t say it’s truly decentralised in its current state.
What is HOA?
Home Owners Association a group or people that “polices” neighbors and has a hisyory of doing shady things. But he’s referring to the actitude of “coming outta nowhere to tell you what to do” they have in common.
What S_H_K said, people have reported being rebuked for posting pictures without ALT-text and not CW-ing uncommon things like eye-contact or food, for example. One person notably received angry messages for posting about cutting their finger on a sheet of paper without CW. The worst accounts were of POC talking about racism they experienced and being told to put it under CW.
