3mo ago

Why do People Choose BlueSky Over Mastodon?

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.)

211 comments

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.
- Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.
  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.
- A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren't seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.
  And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.
  It was major human infrastructure failure.
  And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of "federation" (and, apparently, "the Internet") to understand why they were being "denied access" to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.
  The truth is, most people don't like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.
- You literally cannot search for Mastodon without getting a weird ass 2-paragraph manifesto about The Fediverse.
  End users just want to use shit.
- The difference is that you won’t find yourself unable to send an e-mail because the admin of your e-mail server doesn’t like someone from the recipient’s e-mail server.
  
  No? There are a lot of mail providers that are listed as spam on other providers „just because“. So yes, that literally does happen.
  
  I mean, that is a possible thing for your e-mail admin to do. They just generally don't.
  
  Why not?

You have to pick a Mastodon server, before you know anything about anything. The acquisition funnel probably drops 90% of the people checking it out right there.
- ☝️ This. It's why I put off signing up for Mastodon for a long time, even though I am a big supporter of the Fediverse.
- Felt the same about Lemmy when I signed up.
  
  The only reason I actually wound up signing up on Lemmy is that there is one "main" instance by appearance, and it lets you participate in others(?). (Lemmy.world)
  You don't need to know any of the more esoteric stuff to get going.
  
  Just pick an open one, that's the easiest choice. No essays, no worrying about being denied, easy.
- How is picking a Mastodon server different from signing up for email, finding a discord server, signing up to follow channels on youtube, and so on. Somehow people have no problems figuring those things out, but when it comes to Mastodon this is constantly brought up like some insurmountable challenge.
  
  Having to make an informed decision is a barrier to entry. it took me a while because I wanted to make sure I didn't join (and waste time/effort) something I didn't align with.
  
  I agree with you, but to be fair, people don't really choose an email provider. They chose gmail, because anything else is disallowed by everyone's anti-spam measures.
  
  Email has taken 25 years to get people that comfortable with it, and most folks either go with their ISP email, or one of 3 or 4 providers. Discord, you're already in the tech savvy population.
- This, when I decided to join Mastodon I was prompted to choose a server and had to research which one should join and understand how it works.
  It is called UX friction and is well studied in sign up and checkout processes, the more steps the user has to perform the more likely it abandons it.
  
  Just pick one, you're thinking too hard. I just picked one that's open because I didn't want to write an essay about myself to prove my worth and get someone to accept me, because I know that there isn't any reason why anyone would accept me over someone else (I'm a nobody). I hate the idea of someone else having to review my worth before being allowed to sign up, what a disgusting concept. "Oh it's to stop spam 🤓" All the other sites have been dealing with Spam good enough without asking me to prove my worth to them, maybe the Fediverse should take some pointers from the big boys at Big tech, they seem to be doing better than you are when it comes to this.
- That definitely makes a difference, you can choose which but by default it already selects one so some people won't even change it for convenience, however, that's not a thing on Mastodon so.. Also, a lot of those are mobile users and BlueSky has a lot more Twitter-like familiar UI than Mastodon apps (maybe I'm wrong and if so, point me to which one because there are so many.. there goes another issue and convenience out of the window for people who just don't care about searching and wants something to be done quick - so basically most of Twitter users that still didn't leave it or went to BlueSky)

People expecting a new Twitter when switching to Mastodon were met with weird behavior and nerds who told them the awful search function or weird comment count is working correctly because that's how federation works. Well if that's the case then federation is shit.
- This is unfortunately the world of open-source.
  Nerd tells you to use the open-source thing.
  Non-technical tries it and asks questions
  Nerd proclaims it's not a real problem/your fault/not applicable/fix it yourself
  Some company takes that open-source version or idea, makes it easier for end users and monetize it
  Nerd gets angry and repeats step 1
  Source: I am nerd and I contribute to open-source.

I'm on both Mastodon and Bluesky. To me, Mastodon's biggest problem is its refusal to have an algorithm to surface popular content. Yes there are problems with algorithms, but I don't have the time or inclination to read every post in chronological order. A good algorithm would show me popular posts without manipulating me for profit.
- Problem with algorithms showing popular content is that once you have them, you'll have people trying to use them to make money. And by extension people trying to manipulate you for profit. Doesn't have to be the platform itself doing it for it to be harmful.
  
  Of course, but good luck getting those 5% of users that actually produce nearly 100% of the content to move over if their business model cannot work. And once those move, you know where all the people following them move.
  
  Yeah being manipulated by algorithm is a problem. The best solution I can think of is Mastodon adding the ability to choose your algorithm. Not just a list of approved ones since the admins could manipulate that list, but the ability to actually upload some code so you can either write your own algorithm or choose one written by someone you trust.
  That comes with a lot of problems like potentially overworking the server so I don't know if it's actually a viable solution but it would be nice.
- I'm inclined to agree that's a problem. Everyone's first encounter with a social media content recommendation algorithm was one designed to manipulate them into clicking ads, so it caused some backlash. Recommendation algorithms can be tuned to show things people care about and want to engage with.
  
  Exactly, a lot of algorithms on for-profit sites are manipulative trash but refusing to have any algorithm at all is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- Exactly I had difficulty finding content and any "guide" or anything I seemed to find was too confusing or not practical for me. I don't use Twitter, blue sky, or mastadon regularly but when I checked them all out, blue sky was the best in all round; "Ease of use" and "easy to find content"
- There’s a trending posts list which helps fill this want for me.
- To me, Mastodon’s biggest problem is its refusal to have an algorithm to surface popular content.
  Isn't Explore - Posts on the desktop web client exactly what you're looking for? It was always there and it's where I spend most of my Mastodon time.
  
  It looks like that's popular posts by anyone, not just by people I follow. So it's a start, but different people want to see different things so having a single firehose like Explore doesn't really meet the need. For me, I want to see popular stuff by people or hashtags I follow. Other people might want to see other things.
- thats the entire point of mastodon.
  literally why it was built. Edit :
  It’s not supposed to be a place you go to get served content. You pick who you follow, and that’s your feed.
  The problem has been lack of adoption by popular news and culture . So you go there, and you cannot easily find high volume content provided like the bbc, nfl, Real Madrid, Activision, etc etc
  
  I think people are misunderstanding what I mean by algorithm. An algorithm could show you stuff from people you don't follow (yuck), but it could also show you popular stuff only from people you follow. That used to be how Facebook did it.
  
  We get that it is the design philosophy for Mastodon to not have an algorithm serving content, but it appears to be a non-starter for a lot of users of Twitter like services.
  In theory, a third party could write that algorithm and implement it in some form. Truth Social functions like that, but without federating to the rest of Mastodon.
- That sounds more like a feature than a bug. I remember when Twitter was actually useful. You could sort by "new" as the default and your feed only included stuff from people you followed. And then it went to complete shit with the sort defaulting to "fuck your preferences", sponsored content and your feed being littered with click bait, paid content and all the other bits of enshitification. And that is all built on the algorithmic selection of content.
  
  I didn't say it was a bad thing, I just said it's one reason Bsky is more popular. People are busy and want algorithms.
- This is a great commentary to me. I think it shows just how much of an appetite we currently have for a curated space. It’s almost like Mastodon is a service that’s about 15 years too late.
  I remember going around to older forums and sites looking for specific content when I wanted it, and I wasn’t always guaranteed to find something I liked, but I would often see something interesting.
  Now, though, I really want anywhere I go to knock me off my feet with good content because that’s what I’m conditioned to. Isn’t that what makes me an addict, though? I’m wondering if that chance of dissatisfaction isn’t a virtue to ensure no one platform takes control of all my attention.
- I think using hashtags with filters serve the same purpose
  
  But it still won't put my friend's popular posts at the top, right? I don't want to scroll past 20 pictures of people's dinner and then find out one of my friends got engaged, I want the "I got engaged" post at the top because it's probably getting the most interaction.
- The lack of an algorithm is a solution. Social media tends to be too addictive to the point it can be harmful to humans, so Mastodon was intentionally designed to be less addictive.
  
  Algorithms makes me less addictive because it always suggest the same type of boring content

Mastodon being federated is absolutely not a flaw. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place. The fact that people got used to using centralized platforms is an aberration and this needs to be actively fought against.
- I should have been more clear. I meant “The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption”.
  The post was about why Mastodon isn’t receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn’t achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word “flaw”, as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.
  
  I don't think there's a lot of evidence that federation is a significant obstacle in practice. Email is a great example of a federated platform that even the least tech literate people are able to use just fine. It could be argued that Mastodon onboarding process could be smoother, but that's not an inherent problem with it being federated.
  In my view, the simplest answer is that BlueSky has much better marketing because it has a ton of money behind it and it's been promoted by Dorsey whom people knew from Twitter. So, when people started abandoning Twitter, they naturally went to the next platform he was promoting.
  I'd also argue that there is a big advantage to having smaller communities of users that focus on specific topics of interest and can federate with each other. In my experience, this creates more engaging and friendlier environment than having all the users on the same server. Growth for the sake of growth is largely meaningless.

.....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.
Ask your average social media user what any of that means and you'll get blank stares.
- the average social media user wants to know what face cream Kim Kardashian uses, follows Cristiano Ronaldo and thinks you should go back to your own country.
  
  Oof. That is bleak, and all the more so because you’re probably dead on

Because in Bluesky, you open the app, create an account, and you’re good to go.
Federation is way too complex of an idea for the average person. Picking a server and then understanding instances is much too complicated.
- The average person understands email pretty well. Mastodon doesn't require much more understanding than that, but could probably use some UX and messaging work.
  
  No I’m sorry this is not correct. Most people don’t know how email works. They don’t understand federation, how servers work, or have the confidence or patience to learn it. They want to click an app and get content.
  You are on an open source self hosted federated media platform exclusively inhabited by tech super users and developers. We are very much in an echo chamber here. I leave you this study that I keep posting here when Lemmy users lament over the lack of uptake from the general public:
  https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
  
  Do they though? To most of my peers email=gmail
  I do agree that it's a good way to explain federation, anybody willing to be openminded will get the concept very quickly (I mean the importance of federation, like for email, not simply the fact that it's a thing / old tech but whatever who cares).
  But will many be exposed to those posts or articles explaining the fediverse while staying inside of the walled gardens? I hope so, personally I'm not going there anymore myself :)
  
  The average person understands email pretty well.
  No, they really don't.
- I was going to reply with this. This is exactly one of the problems. I didn't have a Twitter, but I wanted to join mastadon. I had to find a way to access it, and an instance to sign up on. In theory it's good but for a new user it can be difficult to sign up.
  Then ofc the difficulty of finding content, there is content, but part of the no frills meant most of the stuff I saw wasn't in English (I am a mon-english speaker) and it was tricky to figure out how to juat get English content let alone content I was interested in.
  
  I’m reasonably tech savvy. All my personal computers run Linux, I have a 2-node proxmox homelab with 10+ containers and virtual machines running self hosted services. I can hack other people’s code together from web searches to sometimes make things work.
  I had to do a few web searches to figure out how to sign up and get started on Mastodon. If it was a bit of a challenge for me with my listed tech skills, it’s insurmountable to the average user in the general public.

Yhea your first mistake is thinking that 99% give a flying fuck about federation
It just makes it's more complex to adopt
Bluesky ?
Go on there, sign-up, done
Everything works.
Nothing else to do. Nothing to understand.
- This is the only correct answer.
  It's easy to get on and it works just like Twitter. People don't even need to understand what Federation is to get up and running on the platform.
- The lemmy devs should add a feature to their website where you can just create and account and it creates and account on an instance that is closest geographically to the IP address you are connecting from and is federated with the most servers.
  Single place for normies to make an account and they don't have to think about the federation bits, but if they get interested they can always make an account manually on another instance.
  
  Probably some filter would be needed. Like a list of curated instances.
  Imagine if the geographically closest is the Furry instance.

I think the problem is Mastodon makes it hard to find people to follow. I can’t even find mainstream media official accounts, let alone an actual celebrity. The discovery features need to be improved.
Meanwhile on BlueSky I instantly see every major news outlet in my main feed.
- For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.
  
  Problem with that is that is catering to a certain set of people while ignoring a whole larger user base that Mastodon could appeal to.
  
  Maybe you just arent the main target and thus be more suited to Mastodon rather than BlueSky.

Bluesky is way more approachable than Mastodon. Most people don't want to have to learn what an instance is.
- People are less tech literate and considerably stupider than they were 20 year ago. It's shocking.
  
  Blame Apple I guess
  
  The year is 2034 and 96% of the population is unemployed because they are all forced to "do their own research" on literally everything and there's no time to work. We all must research every niche topic to fully understand it before using it or the other 4% calls us stupid and lazy.
  No longer are we allowed to just buy a shower head, or bike or sign up for email without sources cited and proof we know everything about said thing.
  Have kids? Do their research too, no chocolate milk unless I've proven why it's good.
  Elderly parents? Don't let them touch that Roku remote. I need a research paper on all the options I explored.
  Sorry for all the sarcasm. I fix my house, I work, I mow the lawn and shuttle children to sports, and my friend says check this bluesky thing out, 30 seconds and I'm signed up and have a friend and a discover tab and a search that works. Life's chaotic and I don't want to be defined as stupid because I can't spend hours figuring something out in place of something I think is more important.
  All this not directed at you specifically but I guess it hit a nerve.

BlueSky doesnt club you with nonstop Linux nerds

Mainstream tech adoption needs a neat clean wrapper imo. I think that's the biggest missing piece to fediverse, people want pretty, simple, plug and play.
If a wrapper like that could be put on top of/combined with all the good qualities that the fediverse offers, I think it would create optimal conditions for slow adoption.
- Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.
  
  Like Mastodon.social? Afaik it has been around since the beginning and is basically the "default" server unless you're a "hacker" and you're on infosec.pub or whatever, an edgy 4channer and you're on poa.st, a SubGenius on "Bob's" server dobbs.town, or one of the many pervert servers, or one of the asain servers I can't read, but if you're on one of those (for instance dobbs.town) you're joining dobbs.town and mastodon is just there incidentally. Anyone else can just use .social and call it a day until they find out they're really into plants.space or some specific thing.
  Hell all the people I've gotten on masto that's how I did it, "Ok make an acct on mastodon.social, great now lemme follow you what's your name? Cool, see there I am! Oh I'm not on mastodon.social, I'm on dobbs.town, but we can still communicate like how I email your gmail from my protonmail, is normal. Now, there's some servers you're gonna want to block..." I don't even tell them about federation until they're already there, unless I KNOW the server they'll want (like when I recommended my Discordian friend hop on discordian.social instead of mastodon.social.)
  The real kicker is that none of their precious celebs they follow are on there, as you mention. The weirdos I talk to don't care about that so it works out for me lol.
  
  It's the raison d'etre. Saying "don't federate" is like saying "don't put images and rich hyperlinking on the WWW, just make it like Gopher." If you don't want to federate, don't. But saying that it was a bad move for ActivityPub is just nonsensical.

I agree with the other commenter's points, but one thing I think people forget to mention is that BlueSky feels like Twitter in a way Mastodon just doesn't. When I am trying to pitch Mastodon to people, I usually compare it to Tumblr because the vibes are similar.
Mastodon is also flat out hostile to influencers, and by that I mean the platform is designed to be terrible to influencers. The lack of an alogarithm means you can't game the system, no quote tweets means you get less opportunities to spread, no reply limiting means your notifications are going to be going nuts from the replies. The culture on Mastodon is difficult to game too, since people there expect thoughtful responses to their replies.
- Exactly. The design, the sign-up process, the colors, the formatting, it's all very pre-Musk-Twitter.
  Even the icon is reminiscent!
  It's as smooth a transition as you can make it, so no wonder people do it effortlessly.
  Meanwhile in camp Mastodon: "Please pick a server" -> tab closed already
- Personally I have zero interest in influencers and I’d rather use a platform that isn’t designed to amplify their content. That’s just me.
  
  I mean, same here, but if an influencer migrates from Twitter they usually bring their fans with them.

Personal answer: I draw art for a stupidly niche internet community. I'm a less popular artist so I go wear the community already is. I found one other artist on Mastodon and several on Bluesky.

Two things I don't see anybody saying:
BlueSky is has venture capital funding, giving it greater marketing capabilities. Capitalism isn't won by having a better product, it's won by convincing people they should buy your product.
Dumb luck. Sometimes things just go viral, and you can try to figure it out in hindsight, but even that's just a guess. If people could accurately predict what was going to be popular, venture capitalists wouldn't have like a 90% miss rate.

the instances I join keep collapsing and getting deleted
- Nice profile picture!
  
  ah thank u, it is a bit silly

Bro do you really think common people know all about this open source interconnected stuff. Get out of your linux bubble
- Right, I'm super pro open source but most normal people don't give a shit. Sure I think those people are stupid, but it doesn't change reality.
  
  "my taste is better than yours👆🤓" type vibes

I don't think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don't really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don't know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don't people think, "I don't know what instance to join, so I'm not going to choose any?"
Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don't like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I'm extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there's no option for an algo.
The UI seems fine to me. I guess I'm not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.

the discovery on bsky is pretty nice, i dont see an equivalent on my masto instance

People don't care about federation. Or vendor lock-in.
I haven't tried bluesky, but mastodon seems a little broken by design. I'd you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies. Things like that make it seem immature and perhaps just a bad solution compared to a monolithic approach.
If you don't like the instance (why wouldn't I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It's not really a good solution. I would like to exist on mastodon and just use some server. If I don't like it, continue somewhere else.
- I'd you go to a post you are always told that the host server may have more replies
  Just yesterday I opened a post on Masto that had 80 boosts. I went to my home instance to boost it, and it said 10 boosts. I get that things will sometimes be out of sync due to federation and I don't think those numbers need to be exactly the same, but that's a huge difference.
  If you don't like the instance (why wouldn't I?) you can just move to a different one. Yes, and restart my network. It's not really a good solution.
  Yep. I've moved several times and the process sucks. It's ridiculous that your posts and followers don't follow you. It's technically possible to do it: just give every account a public/private key pair for identity, and if you migrate to a new instance your public/private key pair come with you so you can prove that you are still you, and then there should be no problem bringing your posts and followers to the new instance. But despite the fact that switching instances is a core feature of the Fediverse, the process sucks.

I can't tell for BlueSky because I have not joined yet, but I did create a Mastodon account months ago and I'm not sure what to do with it or how to interact with others. I find it confusing.
On Twitter I was mostly following a bunch of like minded people, liking their stuff, and I could see what they liked too. But on Mastodon there's uuh, boosts and favorites?! I'm not sure of how it works or what I'm doing. I can't just "like" posts? I have to boost them?! I found the people I liked that were on Twitter, but on Mastodon I feel like there's nothing I can do aside from seeing posts and it's just not attractive.
- Boosting is retweeting. Favoriting is liking.
- There is no algorithm spying on you across the web and recording your actions and behavior to try and force you to engage with an automated sub-optimal content stream, you have to manually curate your own (hopefully optimal) content stream, which you then engage with. That's basically the difference between Mastodon and the rest of them.

It's lack of marketing since it is not a business, and people conflating useful optional features with confusing usage.
Everyone I know moved to bluesky, after which bluesky basically immediately sold out to crypto people. I brought up the idea of "hey, this is why I think mastodon is a lot better, because it's impossible for it to sell out entirely", to which one person lost their fucking shit and responded stating that I was "fear mongering".
This person also said they didn't care if a business owned all their data and controlled their entire life because "all their data is owned already anyway".
This same person also said that after the recent US election they "spent the night throwing up until they were dry heaving and crying".
Why they claim to not care about their life being controlled by corporate entities, but claim to care so hard about their life being controlled by a government that they say they have a physical reaction to it is a subject I haven't broached because I'm sure they wouldn't be able to see their hypocrisy if they pointed the James Webb telescope at themselves.
In a nut shell, many people are incredibly stupid and not at all interested in their best interests unless the news tells them which interests they should care about.
- basically immediately sold out to crypto people.
  Wait what? I know very little about BlueSky and even less about the people behind it, so I didn't know that. Could you send me a link to more info?
  
  https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a
  They announced a series A in which they stated they are implementing paid features through a subscription model and took 15 million dollars from Blockchain Capital.
  They say in this statement they won't "Hyper Financialize" the platform, which is corporate doublespeak for "We are now monetizing this platform".
  The additions to their board are people who come from crypto/NFT companies.
  As a result, the clock is now ticking on Bluesky and its destruction is inevitable due to the laws of capitalism.

I’m gonna echo what others have said here. The mastodon signup process is too complex, and searching for instructions just leads to “what is the fediverse and/or activitypub” explainers.
I created a mastodon account a few years ago and it was my first introduction to the fediverse. It was frustrating and I only persevered because I REALLY wanted to replace twitter.
Once I got it set up, I realized that no one who I followed on twitter was there. My feed is currently like 2 people, plus a bunch of dead accounts from people who dipped their toe in but didn’t stay.
Joining Bluesky was simple, and there were already a bunch of accounts I wanted to follow. The recent influx has increased that, and it feels a lot like old school twitter without the nazis.
People originally joined twitter (and stuck with it for so long) because that’s where everyone else is. Mastadon is too clunky join and use, so people aren’t.
- My feed is currently like 2 people, plus a bunch of dead accounts from people who dipped their toe in but didn’t stay.
  For me a lot of those toe dippers were subsequently found to have settled on BlueSky.
  
  Same here, which is why my Bluesky feed is much better. Everyone wants to be where everyone else is (that isn’t X), and it seems like that’s Bluesky.

For me it's that more people I wanted to follow are now on blue sky but I have both. I have been liking the community on blue sky a little more.
I never used twitter though so what do I even know lol

Most people don't know much, and don't care that they don't know much. Half of US adults can't read at a 6th grade level. They don't care about and probably do not understand complex topics.
That's it. They just want cat gifs, and that's the end of the thought.
I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn't care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.
A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.
- I honestly don't get the whole "picking an instance is hard" thing, especially with masto. "Just use the default instance, mastodon.social, unless you have a reason not to," bang problem solved. Then it'd become a larger point of failure but if it went down "well now that you sorta understand it make an acct on the server most of your follows were on," bang 'nother problem solved.
  Hell I have been diagnosed with executive function disorders and I can figure it out, it's not as hard as people pretend, we've all done it with email since like '95. "It's hard" is just twitter/bluesky propaganda!
  
  I've heard that there's some problems with picking up only the most popular servers, and that mastodon.social has some moderation issues
  
  I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.
  People's brains don't work good.
  
  Some instance have different rule as well as block other instances which will throw anyone off especially if it a big well-known instance like Mastodon.social which alienate large userbase of Fedi.

Bluesky is more similar to Twitter and has what most people were used to, like an algorithm, quote tweets, etc I found it extremely boring, but tbh it's a more polished experience. One of my biggest annoyances with Mastodon is how threads and replies look weird. Sometimes I see the reply to a post before I see the post, especially in the "lists" view. Also not having an algorithm is both good and bad. It's great because it's organic, but it also means many posts get buried and it's dependent on the time. As someone not living in the US and Europe, it's tricky because sometimes you'll post something when most people are asleep and no one will see it. I ultimately love Mastodon more because of the openness and the federation. But most people will find Bluesky more approachable

its about blueskys volume reaching a 'critical mass' which will continue to then draw users.
huge groups (recently, brazil) moved there en-masse because it already had a ton of users.
its the same reason twiiter even still has users.. they dont want to leave that volume of subscribers.
- That's a bit of a circular reference: "it got popular because it got popular". The question remains: why did BlueSky reach that threshold and Mastodon did not?
  
  Easier registration and everyone is on the same server by default. Think it’s that simple.
  
  yes, its a chicken and egg problem and a huge hurdle for literally anyone trying to create new platforms.
  its about feature parity (even if they dont really exist, re:account portability), marketing among other things. bluesky is run buy a bunch of big names who were able to draw an initial load of users which got their ball rolling.

A lot of people are offput by having to choose a server before creating an account. If that could be automated somehow I think Mastodon would be more popular.
- Yeah... but I think it's too late for Mastodon to be popular. Bluesky is already at the tipping point.
  Mastodon just needed to sign you up to their own default server, power users could sign up to different ones and they would have still got the regulars in the door. Mastodon also needed twitter feature parity, something Bluesky also managed much faster.
  Once people are in and settled, then they would start asking questions about that URL after their username, people would slowly become comfortable with the federation and understand it.

People have to choose a server with mastodon, and you can't just pick any server because of the mess of defederations.

Easy.
No one outside of the fediverse bubble gives a fuck about federation. It solves a problem no one has, and offers no real solutions to problems users have.
Mastodon offers nothing on the Twitter experience outside of "but it's federated"

Most of people choose what marketing makes them to choose.
All that's missing is the garage myth behind the creation of BlueSky, without forgetting how its creator is a genius, and these people would be willing to pay for access!
Centralized or decentralized platforms, they don't care lol

federation could be abstracted away, much the same way filesystems are right now
- Perhaps... But how exactly?
  
  i wish i had that answer
  its usually how corpos and ux people seem solve these issues
  
  Initial log in in the apps should default to mastodon.social with other servers buried under a menu

On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird "federation" tech reason, whatever that means;
On email, you must pick a server, for some weird "server" reason, whatever that means;
It's literally no different than deciding "should I go with Gmail or ~~hotmail~~ ~~msn~~ ~~yahoo~~" fuck ok I guess there really is only one email provider now. Huh.
- Yahoo and AOL email are both still around and relatively widely used, and there's plenty more that aren't ran by large companies, like FastMail.
  
  I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but that was a joke. I am indeed aware of the existence of other email services.

Because federation is confusing to the general populace

The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
Just to be devil's advocate, perhaps the federated nature of Mastodon could be its greatest strength as well. Isn't part of the point of all of this to avoid too much centralized control of social media?
Sure, Mastodon may never have as much mainstream appeal as BlueSky, but I use both. One of the reasons why I like Mastodon is precisely because I want to interact with more of a niche community on a federated platform. To interact with the masses on a platform that is more centralized, I use BlueSky.
- perhaps the federated nature of Mastodon could be its greatest strength as well.
  I should have been more clear. I meant "The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest obstacle to it achieving mass adoption".
  The post was about why Mastodon isn't receiving as many user as BlueSky, or in other words, why it isn't achieving mass adoption. It was under this context that I chose to use the word "flaw", as in, flaw towards reaching mass adoption.
  One of the reasons why I like Mastodon is precisely because I want to interact with more of a niche community on a federated platform.
  I agree. Mastodon being niche isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The absolutely delightful feature that you can use block lists, where you can block all of the MAGA trash with a click and effectively silence them from your life. The ability to collectively silence them is golden.

Just because BlueSky isn’t federated doesn’t mean it’s (totally) centralized. It uses the AT protocol which means user data lives in a separate place than the app itself. While the BlueSky app is centralized all the user data (your posts, likes, etc) live in a separate place and can be self-hosted. This means that if BlueSky went bust or something, users could easily just move to a new platform that someone would inevitably create and all of their data, likes, follows would all be there.
- is that migration documented?
  
  Sort of. There isn’t another platform to migrate to at the moment. But this link explains how to self-host your data (PDS) https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
  And in general, because of the way the protocol works, you could easily build a new app and just use the data that Bluesky wrote. So another platform wouldn’t even need users to “migrate”, since it’s “being your own data”

Bluesky has brand recognition (founded by the same dude as Twitter), more people and "feels like twitter", in the sense of what you see, more than mastodon. Also, news outlets seem to be migrating there.
Mastodon (and pleroma, misskey, etc) is seen as a place for weirdos and techies, with "nothing interesting going on". Several people mentioned this already one way or another, but that most servers/instances are "specific" about whatever means that people will feel that they might miss out on something by choosing the wrong server.

Because people I want to follow are on Bluesky?
(I mean, duh? Did you really need people to state that?!)
- And why that people are there? And why the people that people follow are there? Period.

I had to switch Mastodon instances because of leftist infighting.

This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it,
Bluesky is designed to be federated though. It's just not fully available yet. Also, Bluesky is open-source, licensed under the MIT license.
- Really? This is the first time I'm hearing all of this /g

Mastodon is ideologically sound, but has not nailed the UX
- Lemmy has terrible UX too. I only find it useable because of third-party apps.

Probably easier for social graph exploration TBH, it's one of Mastodons main handicaps.

Because they miss the algorithm
- Nice profile picture!

Instead of comparing these smaller platforms together to find out why one is better or not people should be focusing on why xitter and Facebook are still two of the most popular forms of social media.
- Network effects, boomers being unable to figure out how to switch
  
  It's not just boomers though. I work with a lot of younger people and they all still use xitter/facebook.
  They either don't know/care about alternatives because "everyone else is using it"

Twitter is evil
Mastodon has bad UX
BlueSky is fresh

Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn't give a fuck about federation, yet it's the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.
I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you're flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.
Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven't implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.
Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter's original founders.

Because not everyone has the same opinion.
It doesn't mean they are wrong, it just means they like different things than you.
Of course I have to ELI5 in .ml

Isn't blue sky made by the same people who made Twitter?
It makes sense that people who are leaving twitter because of Elons changes are nostalgic and see that the old Twitter people made a new one so they jump in. Basically name recognition.
(I have only used Twitter)
- As a matter of fact, Bluesky originally was supposed to become Twitter's back end, but it was spun off when Elon took over. Jack Dorsey left and is now promoting nostr and X.

The only reason is the sign up/UX thing. Maaaaybe. And now a critical mass is there

I'd say its because less people probably know of mastodon then bluesky, since on Twitter everyone seems to be making a bluesky account but no one a mastodon account which would result in less people knowing about it.

Simple - because it's not Twitter.

tried to register on first mastodon instance that popped up. couldn't because I have a Russian email. that summed up my experience.

In two word, Jack Dorsey
- Howso?
  Also he hasn't been involved for a while.

It’s more difficult to run government psyops on mastodon.

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