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.
Why are people preferring Blue Sky over Mastodon?
Submitted 1 year ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to fediverse@lemmy.world
Comments
EnderMB@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
I’m sure a certain percentage of people can’t spell mastodon.
woelkchen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.
GhiLA@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I’ve read from Misskey/Forkey users that Misskey and the Forkeys actually have an easier-to-use Web UI than Mastodon
The *keys have a UI that has a similar design language to Twitter, but a fairly different layout. I think it’s close enough that people would recognize it as “Twitter, but different”, vs Mastodon’s “Twitter, but archaic, and also different, and therefore confusing”.
The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.
It made my soul sad.
But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO. The push-and-pull between “we want to be mainstream” and also “fuck the mainstream normies” is palpable, and super cringey, and it turns people away quickly.
JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
The *keys also had many of the features that Twitter migrants complained were lacking from Mastodon. But trying to talk to anyone on Mastodon about platforms that aren’t Mastodon was a total non-starter. Mastodon is a giant Mastodon circle jerk.
If you see someone tell Mastodon users that the Fediverse isn’t Mastodon, they’re hardly ever on Mastodon themselves. They’re most likely on Friendica which suffers the most from obnoxious Mastodon users, and if not, they’re likely to be on Firefish or Akkoma or sometimes on Hubzilla.
The most extreme case I’ve encountered was a Mastodon developer who tried to convince me, a Hubzilla veteran, that Mastodon is literally the only feature-complete project in the Fediverse. Fortunately for him, I didn’t ask him about full text formatting support, permissions, nomadic identity, multiple independent identities on one login, WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV or a built-in wiki engine.
But the real issue with Mastodon is that it has a significant population of people who believe it’s a sacrosanct cultural space, and that are very vocal about telling anyone coming into it that they need to learn the local customs or GTFO.
Worse yet, “coming into it” is also applied to everything in the Fediverse that isn’t Mastodon. After learning that there’s, in fact, more than Mastodon in the Fediverse, many Mastodon users still think Eugen Rochko has invented the Fediverse, and everything must have come after Mastodon.
Thus, even Friendica users who have been around since before Mastodon even saw its very first release are being forced to ditch Friendica’s own culture, adopt Mastodon’s culture instead and stop using all of Friendica’s features that Mastodon doesn’t have. And Friendica is five and a half years older than Mastodon. It has its own well-defined culture which is very different from Mastodon’s because Friendica is so much different from Mastodon.
It’s almost like European colonists vs natives, only that the European colonists didn’t assume the natives had entered the previously completely uninhabited land after them.
bilb@lem.monster 1 year ago
Because you install the app, make an account, and use it and now it has more celebs I guess.
konomikitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Because BlueSky will get them more engagement than Mastodon.
demizerone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We need a community owned centralized service. I don’t think this model is a good one for social media, it’s too complicated.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 1 year ago
Why is anyone usi5any of them? They’re all clogged toilets overflowing the same shit onto the flower.
lunarul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This article gives a good view from an average user’s perspective.
58008@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Because centralized services are easier to use.
Psythik@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
ObstreperousCanadian@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
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.
maplebar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?
BlueSky has rich people behind it.
_pi@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
They’re the same answer.
You need money to market applications to users.
maplebar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
leraje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
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.
Chef_Boyardee@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s because of the connotation with an overrated metal band of the same name.
/s for the overly serious
L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
What is with all these wall of text answers guys?
Twitter people like Twitter and Twitter man for making it. Twitter now not Twitter is now X and no more Twitter man. Twitter people not like TeslaSpace man. Twitter man make BlueSky.
No elephant needed to make this story work. Remember: twitter brain cannot handle too many characters.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
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.
communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 year ago
Bluesky s federated and mit licensed
_pi@lemmy.ml 1 year ago
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. We’ll see it again.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I’m talking about Mastodon and Lemmy and such since that’s what OP is complaining about
TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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 it’s 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.
Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
Sergebr@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Because people will choose convenience over their vey own survival. Also, in this case, they apparently don’t see a problem with leaving Twitter because it’s MAGA to join BS which is backed by MAGA money. Convenience über alles. Ethics be damned. I’m fine with people like that not joining the fediverse.
Emperor@feddit.uk 1 year ago
hamFoilHat@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have a friend who has had a mastodon instance since it was gnu social, and there are two reasons I stopped using it.
First, the UI sucks. He installed 3 or 4 different skins and they were all barely usable. I don’t want or need something flashy, xfce is my favorite windows manager, but it needs to at least work and not be confusing.
Second, the people suck. It went from being okay to by the time I left I don’t think I was seeing any exchanges that didn’t have antisemitism or racism.
ikidd@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Mastodon is a pain in the ass to get signed up for anyone under room temperature IQ, so, like, most of Twitter’s users, even the ones smart enough to leave.
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 1 year ago
Sign up process is easier. No existential decisions to be made to get started.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because no one made a droolproof guide to migrating to Mastodon and Bluesky put money into it.
For people who can’t remember their password, it’s preferable.
BT_7274@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Star power. High production values. Less complex (appears to be more centralized, immediately easy to conceptualize as “twitter but not right wing”)
Lightsong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People like simple and easy to use.
Bluesky got that, fediverse in general don’t have that.
communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 year ago
Bluesky is federated
Lightsong@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah that’s why I said fediverse in general.
Today@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I tried bluesky (bs?) for 5 minutes. Clicked one thing, saw the comment “Sunsets are my love language,” and realized that these are not my people.