Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn't lock users
They have already started letting transphobic journalists harass people without consequence. They are repeatedly unbanning Jesse Singal. Its already enshittified.
They literally owe money to *checks notes… Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.
Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I’m sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn’t as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. “It’s too hard to use!” Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.
It’s a better, more usable platform than mastodon for the average user today, it makes sense people will move to it instead - it’s human behavior.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are. Just dump their ass like a shitty ex if they start abusing the platform. Remind folks that Yahoo, Myspace and Digg seemed unreplaceable at one point, and now they are irrelevant.
I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.
Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.
Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.
But then you just move on to the next free trial.
It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween.
If only people make an effort… most mastodon clients allow you to configure the timelines and if you have an empty wasteland of subscribed tags well, you’re subscribed to some very niche stuff… try posting about it, maybe others are listening - that implies effort, though, so be careful.
I haven’t yet heard an explanation for this that makes sense. It looks more like Twitter and it has VC money behind it. That’s it, as far as I can tell.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are.
It would be easy if they were actually decentralized. The way it is now, if you leave, you leave all of your friends. Getting all of your friends to leave with you is a ridiculous task. You can’t even get 3 of your friends to agree on where to eat for lunch. Try getting all of your friends to follow you to a different social network, where they have to create new accounts, etc. If you have that kind of clout, you should start a religion.
The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
The signup process for Bluesky is the same as Mastodon. You can join the “main instance” at joinmastodon.com or choose an alternative instance. Most people aren’t going to wade through the sets of rules on alternative instances like you did; they’ll just join the default instance at joinmastodon.com.
having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask
Email is the usual analogy.
trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating.
Your average person will just land on mastodon.social without bothering to read the TOS… i mean rules, you know that.
And you missed a real key argument: network effect. If average person’s friends are on platform XYZ, that’s where average person will be (although this is stronger with messengers).
Everyone is using Gmail or Hotmail. So it’s not the same, even if it technically might be.
When I searched for Mastodon a few years back the first page I landed on was one where I had to browse and choose an instance. If that was what most people saw back then during the first Twatter exodus, then nobody is going to look back.
The average person is where all their friends, who are also average people, will go. And that’ll be on the platform that requires the least effort to sign up to. Which isn’t Mastodon.
UX is always going to be the number one priority for a SoMe, when people have to pick one. People are not suckers for wanting proper solutions. FOSS projects need to prioritise this much higher that many of them do, otherwise they will never crawl out of the shadows and in to the light and forever stay with the nerds willing to accept an inferior UX.
It’s not our responsibility to make FOSS projects better, blaming consumers for wanting a feature prioritized is ridiculous and counter productive. Ease of use is something FOSS projects need to have to be viable to the general populace
You aren’t a consumer with FOSS. You’re part of a community. It’s an entirely different paradigm.
If you don’t like the service that you’re getting for free, there are a couple of options. One that’s already been suggested is to pitch in and help make it better yourself. Another is to start paying. Make donations. Offer to pay developers for the features that you want. Pool your money with other users who also want those features. Developer bounties are a thing.
My wife and daughter use LibreOffice, neither one feels they are part of a community because they’re using FOSS. That’s not how this works.
People use a tool or piece of software because it does what they need and generally stays out of their way. They’re not going to jump ship to be part of a community because. Sure there are people that enjoy working on it, and there’s people who will donate money to make the software better, but you’re not going to convince people to choose FOSS for “the community”. You’re going to convince them by offering a better tool, at a better price without negatively impacting their workflow. That extends to all FOSS just as it extends to normal software and services.
I’m not trying to convince people to use FOSS here. I’m explaining how users of FOSS aren’t “consumers”. It’s understandable that you’d make demands for a service which you are paying for. In the case of FOSS, you’re using a free service, so you can threaten to take your “business” elsewhere, but it makes no difference because you aren’t contributing to the project in the first place.
Imagine if a user of Wikipedia started making demands about what features the site should have, how it should be run, etc. Somebody who had never donated or even edited an article. What do you think the reaction would be?
Or just use a better interface somewhere else 🤷 there is no reason to use a service, free or not, where ur expected to make it better yourself instead of just using a better service
Also, no one is expecting bluesky to avoid succumbing to enshittification. People will just jump ship to a new social media platform as they always have. Mastodon has been around for a long time at this point, but people jump to Mastodon, find it confusing, and leave for something easier to use
People will just jump ship to a new social media platform as they always have.
That isn’t how this works. Nobody’s jumped ship from Facebook despite all the myriad complaints people have had about it for over a decade now.
The only reason why people are moving to BS is because Musk helped a wannabe dictator get elected. In the USA. That’s pretty extreme, and if BS didn’t exist, they would still be on Twitter.
Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷♂️
I have no complaints about Lemmy, but posting on Mastodon is basically screaming into the void - I’ve been trying for more than a year, and I basically hardly ever get any reaction at all. In comparison, in the first week on Bluesky I found multiple people following me, commenting on my silly wine and cactuses posts, and in general just interacting.
Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer Mastodon technically and ethically, but it’s just so goddamned barren and dead I feel completely unmotivated to post there…
On Mastodon in settings you need to enable your account discoverability. Otherwise people will see you only if they know about you. This is weird default and my main complain about Mastodon :(
It’s hard for communities to switch from twitter to bluesky eve with starter packs, custom feeds, etc. Not all people are into programming and that’s basically the only community in mostodon.
Yes (somewhat), just like you can post on Lemmy with Honk, but note that all ActivityPub software, while speaking the same protocol, interacts best with its own kind. Yet.
Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.
Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.
Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.
Tried mastodon, went through three instances, at the end hosted my own single user, ultimately decided the hassle was not worth it. I would rather use nothing than mastodon.
The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
Use Mastadon, Bluesky will eventually have to enshittify as they are a corporation.
They have already started letting transphobic journalists harass people without consequence. They are repeatedly unbanning Jesse Singal. Its already enshittified.
They literally owe money to *checks notes… Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.
Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I’m sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn’t as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. “It’s too hard to use!” Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.
It’s a better, more usable platform than mastodon for the average user today, it makes sense people will move to it instead - it’s human behavior.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are. Just dump their ass like a shitty ex if they start abusing the platform. Remind folks that Yahoo, Myspace and Digg seemed unreplaceable at one point, and now they are irrelevant.
I never used twitter, I tried to use mastodon about a year ago and hated it, I joined bluesky a few weeks back and love it.
Mastodon gives you an autoscrolling firehose of unfiltered junk on all, or an empty wasteland of subscribed tags, with nothing inbetween. I never found anyone I wanted to follow while sifting through screenfuls of firehose, so I didn’t bother.
Bluesky has nice UX, the posts on Discover are mostly engaging content, there’s a bunch of people i’ve heard of over there, tags are encouraged via feeds, the starter packs are nice and the blocklists are amazing.
Will it enshittify eventually? Sure.
But then you just move on to the next free trial.
It took me a week to find a bunch of lefties, journalists and shitposters on bluesky; whatever comes after it will doubtless be just as quick. They’re a fungible commodity - if I can’t find the same specific set of people on the next one, ehh.
If only people make an effort… most mastodon clients allow you to configure the timelines and if you have an empty wasteland of subscribed tags well, you’re subscribed to some very niche stuff… try posting about it, maybe others are listening - that implies effort, though, so be careful.
I haven’t yet heard an explanation for this that makes sense. It looks more like Twitter and it has VC money behind it. That’s it, as far as I can tell.
It would be easy if they were actually decentralized. The way it is now, if you leave, you leave all of your friends. Getting all of your friends to leave with you is a ridiculous task. You can’t even get 3 of your friends to agree on where to eat for lunch. Try getting all of your friends to follow you to a different social network, where they have to create new accounts, etc. If you have that kind of clout, you should start a religion.
I’ll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:
The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.
The signup process for Bluesky is the same as Mastodon. You can join the “main instance” at joinmastodon.com or choose an alternative instance. Most people aren’t going to wade through the sets of rules on alternative instances like you did; they’ll just join the default instance at joinmastodon.com.
Email is the usual analogy.
Your average person will just land on mastodon.social without bothering to read the TOS… i mean rules, you know that.
And you missed a real key argument: network effect. If average person’s friends are on platform XYZ, that’s where average person will be (although this is stronger with messengers).
Everyone is using Gmail or Hotmail. So it’s not the same, even if it technically might be.
When I searched for Mastodon a few years back the first page I landed on was one where I had to browse and choose an instance. If that was what most people saw back then during the first Twatter exodus, then nobody is going to look back.
The average person is where all their friends, who are also average people, will go. And that’ll be on the platform that requires the least effort to sign up to. Which isn’t Mastodon.
UX is always going to be the number one priority for a SoMe, when people have to pick one. People are not suckers for wanting proper solutions. FOSS projects need to prioritise this much higher that many of them do, otherwise they will never crawl out of the shadows and in to the light and forever stay with the nerds willing to accept an inferior UX.
Removed by mod
Consider the following: No.
It’s not our responsibility to make FOSS projects better, blaming consumers for wanting a feature prioritized is ridiculous and counter productive. Ease of use is something FOSS projects need to have to be viable to the general populace
You aren’t a consumer with FOSS. You’re part of a community. It’s an entirely different paradigm.
If you don’t like the service that you’re getting for free, there are a couple of options. One that’s already been suggested is to pitch in and help make it better yourself. Another is to start paying. Make donations. Offer to pay developers for the features that you want. Pool your money with other users who also want those features. Developer bounties are a thing.
My wife and daughter use LibreOffice, neither one feels they are part of a community because they’re using FOSS. That’s not how this works.
People use a tool or piece of software because it does what they need and generally stays out of their way. They’re not going to jump ship to be part of a community because. Sure there are people that enjoy working on it, and there’s people who will donate money to make the software better, but you’re not going to convince people to choose FOSS for “the community”. You’re going to convince them by offering a better tool, at a better price without negatively impacting their workflow. That extends to all FOSS just as it extends to normal software and services.
I’m not trying to convince people to use FOSS here. I’m explaining how users of FOSS aren’t “consumers”. It’s understandable that you’d make demands for a service which you are paying for. In the case of FOSS, you’re using a free service, so you can threaten to take your “business” elsewhere, but it makes no difference because you aren’t contributing to the project in the first place.
Imagine if a user of Wikipedia started making demands about what features the site should have, how it should be run, etc. Somebody who had never donated or even edited an article. What do you think the reaction would be?
Or just use a better interface somewhere else 🤷 there is no reason to use a service, free or not, where ur expected to make it better yourself instead of just using a better service
Damn you’re an insufferable asshat
Yeah he beat that horse to death but he has a point.
Snot’s just frustrated watching history repeat again with literally the same exact people running it. I get it completely.
I know what you are but what am I?
Also, no one is expecting bluesky to avoid succumbing to enshittification. People will just jump ship to a new social media platform as they always have. Mastodon has been around for a long time at this point, but people jump to Mastodon, find it confusing, and leave for something easier to use
That isn’t how this works. Nobody’s jumped ship from Facebook despite all the myriad complaints people have had about it for over a decade now.
The only reason why people are moving to BS is because Musk helped a wannabe dictator get elected. In the USA. That’s pretty extreme, and if BS didn’t exist, they would still be on Twitter.
Ur on lemmy, ur literally proof people will jump ship eventually
Mastodon could have perfect UI and still lose to bluesky. Normal people don’t trust foss and mastodon has no advertising budget.
“Normal people” don’t know, or care, what FOSS is. The lack of advertising does hurt, though.
Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷♂️
I have no complaints about Lemmy, but posting on Mastodon is basically screaming into the void - I’ve been trying for more than a year, and I basically hardly ever get any reaction at all. In comparison, in the first week on Bluesky I found multiple people following me, commenting on my silly wine and cactuses posts, and in general just interacting.
Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer Mastodon technically and ethically, but it’s just so goddamned barren and dead I feel completely unmotivated to post there…
On Mastodon in settings you need to enable your account discoverability. Otherwise people will see you only if they know about you. This is weird default and my main complain about Mastodon :(
Perhaps try to interact with other people on mastodon instead of expecting to grow a follower base? It ain’t tiktok, ya know?
Something is wrong with you.
My Lemmy feed is bangin’. Live long and prosper 🖖
It’s hard for communities to switch from twitter to bluesky eve with starter packs, custom feeds, etc. Not all people are into programming and that’s basically the only community in mostodon.
can we “use” mastodon if we already have lemmy accounts?
Yes (somewhat), just like you can post on Lemmy with Honk, but note that all ActivityPub software, while speaking the same protocol, interacts best with its own kind. Yet.
Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.
Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.
Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.
Tried mastodon, went through three instances, at the end hosted my own single user, ultimately decided the hassle was not worth it. I would rather use nothing than mastodon.
Using nothing is preferable to feeding the beasts that consume and control us.
Mastodon sucks really bad. It’s a complete dead end for an artist.
How does it suck?
Its one if the most well made Android apps I have used and everything so far is intuitive other than DNS website verification
I’ll just paste here what I wrote elsewhere:
The average person is tech illiterate, so having them understand what a “federated platform” is, is too much to ask. It may be easy for you or me, but we’re here on Lemmy, so that immediately makes us not the average.
The average person also doesn’t care what a federated platform is. They just want something that is convenient and works. Same as the above point; maybe we would be willing to sit down and figure things out, but others will consider that a waste of time and bad.
In that sense, federated platforms are a major failure, as picking instances and creating accounts is a hassle rather than a convenience.
From personal experience, trying to find a Mastodon instance to make an account on was irritating. Some rules were too restrictive, some rules were too vague, other rules looked like they were created for sensitive little snowflakes. It was like reading through the rules of Discord servers. Not a good look for a social media platform.
Something like Bluesky tries to be both; a platform without algorithms (or only user-created algorithms that you can choose to subscribe to), where you can make your own instance or just be part of its centralised instance. The fact that the overwhelming number of people choose the latter should tell you enough about what people want.