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.
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Because centralized services are easier to use.
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.
The people leaving Twitter right now want Twitter minus Elon. That’s Bluesky. They’ve heard a couple of their Twitter follows mention it and they’ve gone to their app store where they find an app called Bluesky, install it and easily join and start using it. Once they do they are finding it pretty straightforward to find people they used to follow on Twitter.
That’s all people want.
It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.
Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.
It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.
And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.
Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.
That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what its advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.
That’s exactly what drove me into seeking out Lemmy instead. I hopped on Mastodon and it made me feel like I was being coralled into following some niche hobby forum exclusively, and I wasn’t into that. It didn’t explain that the instance itself was largely irrelevant and that the rest of the platform would open up to me after choosing one.
Lemmy still had a learning curve, but having experience with reddit I was able to pick it up easily enough.
It’s just easier. I have both but I almost never use Mastodon anymore. Federation there doesn’t seem to work right. I didn’t know what an instance was so I joined mastodon.social. Finding and following people in the app doesn’t always seem to work right if they’re on another instance. Doing it in a browser is even more painful.
The people I liked to follow and interact with on X, many tried Mastodon and abandoned it, and many more are now on Bluesky. This creates momentum to “follow the crowd” as it were.
Additionally, you only have one chance to make a first impression. A lot of us tried Mastodon earlier and it wasn’t ready. Bluesky started as invite-only, which drummed up interest before catching this zeitgeist of people leaving X.
Lastly, and maybe it’s just me, but the font sizing on the official Mastodon app on Android is generally too small and can’t be changed. Bluesky allows me to change it and make it more comfortable to use.
Evidentially mastodon makes it hard to find people on purpose unless you know their name “to stop harassment” I’m told, except I’m not sure how it does that at all and it just makes it harder to use the damn platform. That’s my one real complaint about mastodon.
You have to understand we are not normal users. Anyone even remotely interested in federated software are not normal users.
Bluesky may not have 57 third party apps and that’s why people are flocking to it. It’s easy. The signup process through the app involved no selecting of servers, no understanding of what it actually is under the hood, and users are greeted by a default algorithm that feels very much like old Twitter before Musk.
Basically, regular users do not care about the fediverse and just want a competent and polished app and site experience.
You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?
BlueSky has rich people behind it.
They’re the same answer.
You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.
They aren’t really the same answer.
People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has “servers”, as if the entire point of the internet wasn’t to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe… But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?
What’s more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or “will be”™), and as such it’ll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.
Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.
Tbf the internet is entirely comprised of like 6 websites if you ask the average Joe, and I’m damn inclined to agree as someone who remembers webrings fondly and misses geocities (it’s like the bell curve meme lol, and btw yes I know about neocities I’m just sleeping on it).
But I agree, if they can email they can mastodon, it’s the same shit.
57 different 3rd party apps is probably a good start. Mastodon has to be easy to on-board and it isn’t for someone with no technical understanding what domains, servers or instances are. To that group Bluesky makes sense. You are signing up for Bluesky. Try to onboard that group to mastodon and they don’t understand if they are on mastodon.social or mastodon.world or any other instance.
Why would they be on one of those fringe services with less users than bluesky? That’s what a non expert understands
I’ve got an idea as to why.
I went to mastodon.social and see a Linux meme, some heavy political commentary, and a bunch of posts about mastodon being better than Twitter.
I then went to bluesky.app and see some political riffing, cute animals, a comic, some jokes, a company, and even Don Lemon.
The average person checking them both out for the first time, mastodon is nerd shit and Bluesky is normal shit.
Feels like deciding in 2010 between Twitter and Reddit in some ways…
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
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.
All those federated platform will only become popular if the backend is dumb and the frontend is smart, i.e. you create your account on a frontend but can use the same credentials to connect via another frontend and no matter which frontend you connect to, all content for the platform is accessible to you, there’s no admin having control over your experience, only people offering different UI experiences. Federation/defederation/deciding to host NSFW content, that’s all taken care of behind the scene just like on Reddit, for the user they’re just using Lemmy via frontend X or Y and they decide what communities and users they want to block.
Bluesky is federated and mit licensed
This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.
We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.
None of that applies here, can you give a specific method?
I’m talking about Mastodon and Lemmy and such since that’s what OP is complaining about
I’m dabbling in Bluesky atm. Having run my own Masto server for over a year at this point. Here’s things I’ve found that Bluesky does just plain better - mostly cause it’s not beholden to the whims of the ActivityPub protocol.
- Shows me all replies to any post I happen to come across.
- Lets me see all posts about things I happen to search/look for, including hashtags.
- I don’t have to worry about being unable to see content I haven’t personally blocked (not so much of an issue on a small/single server like mine though).
- I can repost things (not actually too bothered with this one but many people want it).
- I can set per post reply permissions to a very granular level (no-one, mentioned, followers, specific followers)
- It handles video in a way that works i.e. I can post them, and people can watch them with minimal buffering/waiting.
- Gives me access to community built collections/algorithms that expose the content I want to see.
- It defaults to providing an additional feed driven by what the people I’m following are liking/interacting with.
- Finally, a big one for new users, it provided a default feed of content when I first logged in so that I had something to look at.
The first two are huge on a small/single user server. By default we get nothing, following a single account will get us the content of just that account and the replies that they happen to reply to. A post may get 200 replies, but unless I go looking on the original server I will see a fraction of that. Technical solutions exist to help with this but the Fediverse’s penchant for privacy and control (quite rightly) limits the effectiveness (Fedifetcher, GetMoarFedi).
3 is something most people won’t think about. But if they become aware they’re not seeing something they thought they’d be able to they then have to deep dive into who’s defederating who and why.
Most all the other points just make the whole thing a much more seamless experience for your average user. Bootstrapping a list of people to follow on a small server is hard (I’d absolutely recommend creating a Fediverse account somewhere large first to build up some sort of list before migrating)
It’s because of the connotation with an overrated metal band of the same name.
/s for the overly serious
Because it pretends to be different to the centralised corporate social media platforms, whilst giving the cohesive experience of a centralised platform
Best answer yet IMO. The cohesive experience is essential to the branding, and low threshold for entry.
Sign up process is easier. No existential decisions to be made to get started.
