What made everyone move to Bluesky or Threads instead of Mastodon?
What made everyone move to Bluesky or Threads instead of Mastodon?
What made everybody move from a corporate social media platform to another corporate social media platform instead of the fediverse?
After all, the Fediverse and Activitypub is much more mature than Bluesky and the copycat AT protocol or Threads and ... whatever they use.
They probably have good discovery and trending post mechanisms. Mastodon makes it a point not to have one, which results in a wholly uninteresting feed for the average user. I'm only on mastodon, but I very rarely use it, because it mostly sucks unless you spend several, several hours trying to track down fun accounts to follow yourself.
- There are more people there.
- Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
- Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.
I'll speak about my experience. Bluesky feels like an upgrade to Twitter. There are many algorithmic feeds to choose from, and it's easy to discover people to follow. Mastodon, on the other hand, is a straight downgrade from Bluesky because it is lacking in those features.
I imagine a lot of people leaving Twitter feel similarly. They don't care much about privacy or federation. Bluesky just works, and that's what matters to them.
Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.
So... everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.
And... I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.
Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn't for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas... I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I've probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).
Several reasons:
- Mastodon is REALLY unfriendly from a UX perspective. To many, federation is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist for them. In their mind, the early model of federation is like email, a problem that was "solved" years ago by having one corporate product that was much better than others (Gmail).
- Reiterating, why should people care about the fediverse?
- The fediverse is lacking the user numbers, and those that do post don't really interact with others. Spend some time with the newhere tag and you'll see a lot of people that make the occasional post, send a lot of replies, and end up leaving because that engagement ends up with maybe 2 followers. It's rather clique-y.
- Some fediverse sites (e.g. Lemmy) have bad reputations, and Mastodon partly suffers from this. Outside of tech, where people argue with each other all the time anyway, there isn't really anything worthwhile being posted.
Generally speaking, how is Mastodon any better than Bluesky? How is Lemmy any better than Reddit? If you can't answer that in a way the average person gives a fuck about, what's the argument for using them?
I needed to scroll way too much to see people mention marketing and advertising. It's a huge deal.
The power of good advertising is not to be underestimated. There is a good statistically proven reason why so much money flows into it. And it's not only traditional advertising but viral and "astroturfed" advertising.
Its easier to just sign up and find everyone immediately, than to go learn what are instances and which one should you choose to make an account on, and then go and learn how to find other people that are not on that instance, or how to check do they have a mastodon account at all, then go and learn how to XY.
The "go and learn" is something that people, most of them, just don't want to do. If you need to learn how to use something, this is the first indicator of a bad user experience. It should be obviously easy for a new person to get around.
Valid question, but Americans in particular are easily swayed by the fact that the corporate ownership is listed as a "Public Benefit Corporation." Bluesky is a PBC and for most people that's enough "proof" that they will "be for the public good."
In that it is set up to "benefit the public good" people just... buy into that, even if the company isn't actually benefitting the public good.
Look at how long it took for people to wise up that the Susan G. Komen foundation was spending most of its money on their CEOs and ads and very little on actually helping people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Pinkwashing
For the general public, Open Source generally means "difficult to set up and use with bad user interface."
And yes, the whole self-hosting thing with numerous servers is confusing to people who have never had to step outside of the corporate-dominated internet.
All that is self-evident based on the original reddit exodus to here on Lemmy. The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light. They're just far too used to private company doing all that "for free" (*cough for all your private data cough) and struggle to understand how the different way it is set up means you don't get all the fancy features from the get-go.
So people saw an option with corporate sponsorship and money behind it, and they leap to that. Also I'm sure Bluesky is investing in advertising their product, which is competing with zero advertising dollars spend on the no-corporate fediverse.
There's a few technical and non technical reasons someone might be on Bluesky/AT instead of Activity Pub. Protocol specific there's:
) Account ownership (theoretically at least, migration is still in development). Though it's hidden behind domain based identification there's a cryptographic key that let's you migrate to another PDS even if yours is down or banned you.
) Performance. Hosting something like a PDS is lighter than an Activity Pub instance.
) User level configuration. Bluesky let's you set custom moderation lists and algorithms, something you can't on Activity Pub.
) Compatibility. Building something like a link aggregator on AT that is compatible with a microblogging platform like Bluesky is likely a lot easier then Activity Pub since AT is broken up into PDSs and Relays. (To be fair compatibility does work on Activity Pub, but it's got jank).
There's also some less technical reasons as well:
) Bluesky is a platform and you don't need to learn a protocol to use it. Yeah it's not that hard to learn how any of the big three protocols work, but it's also not that hard to change your car's oil or sew ripped cloths instead of replacing them - but how many people do those? I'd guess 80% of Lemmy is an IT guy between 20-45 so it can get a little echo chambery on how easy tech is. One if the reasons Threads makes up 99.5%+ of the fediverse.
) Defederatiation is becoming a mess. If some random Joe has a friend on Bluesky & Nostr (both bridged), a few on threads, and a few spread across different instances; yet he can't reach all but 1 or 2 of them from the instance he chose to join on joinmastodon it might be time to reconsider how things are done. Techy people might have no problem sifting through a long list of servers to find the right one, but somebody who's already on the fence is probably going to quit at that point.
) Bluesky has a more mainstream culture, while the fediverse has very specific thoughts and ideas. Had I said I was on Windows you all might have put a hit out on me 😆
My perspective as someone who is mainly active in the anime/gaming fandom and gamedev space:
- Easier onboarding overall since you don't have to bother with choosing an instance and all that
- despite starting out with less features than mastodon (no gifs, they are only getting video in the next update wth), the UI is overall more user-friendly and similar to Twitter's
- Customizable feeds you can easily subscribe to in-app so you instantly have some content on your timeline (+ it's easy to be found in these feeds without having to research the specific tags to use)
- Discoverability (through features and community efforts) is so much better. As someone who mainly follows artists, the last few days my TL was full of people doing artshares via quote-repost chains or sharing "starter packs" with lists of people to follow
- I have seen exactly one artshare post on mastodon so far (the japanese side seems to have it figured out a bit better, though. I regularly see tag-based artshares going around)
- meanwhile, to achieve a similar experience on mastodon I had to manually build myself different feeds in phanpy in which I'm following ~30 tags I have painfully collected to find the posts I'm interested in
- quote-retweets don't exist yet but I kind of see the benefit now
- the stackable moderation also helps a lot
Overall, I think the main problems on Mastodon's side are difficult onboarding and lack of actual community-building efforts. Also, the community just seems to be less welcoming for creators in general imo
Mastodon and the fediverse in general are weirdly user-unfriendly, and then some fucking programmer pops in to say,
"Oh! You can fix that! All you have to do is hop over to their github page and..."
Lol
If they can make the user experience good, we might get the basis for a new internet, but they'd have to build it first.
Mastodon overwhelmed me. I hopped on the website and had no idea what I was looking at. I didn't understand federation. I basically had the option of what niche hobby to join on Mastadon and no indication that I would he able to access a broader forum, so I said "Well, this fucking sucks." and left.
Threads and BlueSky are likely as accessible as making an account and you're done.
A marketing budget. The Fediverse has none, and we're competing with the big boys.
I'm only on the fediverse but I miss algorithms. Recommended accounts (which to be fair exists on a corner of Mastodon), similar accounts to one you just followed, custom home feed, suggested posts, etc. Discoverability sucks on fedi and the lack of interest from devs for some sort of private FOSS implementation is disappointing.
Loops was like let's have a "For You" algo early this year but even that seems to be a dead idea.
I still don't understand those platforms. Didn't when Twitter launched and still don't now that there's several of them. Same thing for like Facebook or its predecessors. They're all more about the person than the message and I honestly quite frankly don't give a shit about random people on the internet.
Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.
Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.
Most people didn't have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.
I used mastodon for a year. It didn’t really work out for me. I just took so much effort to find content or build an audience.
I didn’t go to threads because it’s owned by Zuck. But Bluesky is FOSS add free and decentralised, so I tried it out, and honestly (I’ll probably get hate here for this) but the experience is far better than mastodon. There’s an algorithm, everything works. Mastodon had always been buggy for me. The UI is nice, the community is nice etc.
Plus thanks to bridgy, all of my bluesky posts are automatically displayed on mastodon and I can follow people from mastodon on bluesky.
for me, it was discoverability. Like, several guides said "use tags" but 4 out of 5 people DON"T. And more often than not, when you do search the tags, you see several posts that aren't what you wanted at all. Or worse, the tag you search doesn't have any posts newer than several months to a year. Basically it relied on an honor system where few people had honor.
Bluesky is a lot easier to use fresh out of the box. Even though their feature set is quite similar, Mastadon has a clunky and confusing UI, and still lacks a native iPad app-- instead they offer a poorly ported iPhone app.
That's led to more people using Bluesky, and it snowballs from there.
Is it really that surprising that large companies with lots of money can advertise better than user run instances of open source software?
Instance picking can be overwhelming. Making people just not even try it.
I do think a big challenge for the fediverse is how to ease that. And make it like e-mail where @whocares is not that important and it's easy to actually have a custom domain/instance.
And, of course, to achieve this instance admins should be really be responsible with defederations and bans. And only use it as last resort, probably only because of legal reasons. Not because "I don't like that instance admins main political thesis". Probably that kind of blocks are better to be left to the user.
My personal opinion is that it was:
- Easier signup
- A wider variety of opinions... Fediverse imo is known for tankies and progressives. I'm a progressive so I'm OK w/ the latter, but it can be an echo chamber at times.
- Built-in audiences (Threads especially but also Jack founding a spinoff helps)
- Similar to Linux, one of the benefits to open-source is plenty of forks and standards. This leads to a more fractured landscape at times and so it's rockier than the alternatives
Bsky is more twitter like and less confusing than mastodon.
Bsky is federated too.
Just bridge them all together. Threads and nostr too. Then everyone can use what they want.
edit: seems this already exists. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/09/openvibe-combines-mastodon-bluesky-and-nostr-into-one-social-app/
I use both, but honestly, some mastodon users can't help but be outright patronising and hostile to newcomers.
The whole "we don't do that here" vibe clearly puts folk off. Weirdly, it isn't the long term users that do that, bug more recent converts.
Why do you think that is?
Moved here and never looked back.
Networking effect
Mastodon required people to join a server which made out to people who are used to signing up to a single website for the past 20 years or such, seam too complex.
You also end up in a situation where social media managers have to reach engagement and impression targets and don't think which is best platform that will not be taken over Elon musk or Mark Zuckerberg style, but which will reach engagement targets the quickest.
Initially I heard about mastodon as a Reddit alternative, it was not. I have never been a Twitter user. I did create a Twitter account at some point, I only ever used it to post images from when I was at occupy Wall Street, and then later to follow a couple accounts for updates (Sean Murray of Hello Games). When I opened my own business I created a Twitter account for that specifically and used it to send out coupon codes and stuff like that.
Once musk bought Twitter I deleted both of my accounts. I had totally forgotten about mastodon, so I got on the list for a Bluesky code. Around the time I got my Bluesky code I heard about Lemmy, and then heard about mastodon again. Had my Bluesky code not arrived when it did, I would have created a mastodon account for my business instead of Bluesky. Since I never use either it is a moot point for me.
As depressing as it sounds, most Twitter users actually like Twitter. They're fully okay with all of its dystopian features (some even idolize pre-Musk Twitter). Mastodon is a break from Twitter in many ways, whereas bluesky is just another Twitter in their eyes (many of them probably dgaf about federation and ignore it).
It’s multiple factors but boils down to them being easier for non-techie people to access. It’s also a culture issue. Bluesky culture is more like Mastodon than not but it is more diverse and shifts younger. Lots of gatekeepers and harassers ruined it for would be mastodon users particularly Black and Brown folk that were harassed out of the space. One of the biggest minority ran instances was shut down due to overwhelming harassment. People also don’t want to be preached to nor want to be told how to use their own damn social account and be told they’re using it wrong. Most people legit just wanted Twitter without Musk.
In addition to many of the fine points made in other comments I think it's silly to overlook the power of celebrity worship and weird-ass parasocial relationships with famous people.
There exists a large number of people who aren't really interested in discussing <topic_x>, they just want to know what <favourite celebrity whos life I have deluded myself into thinking is attainable by me> thinks about the topic so that they can regurgitate it and feel like they're "the same".
I'm sure if Chappell Roan or whatever "the kids" think is cool these days had jumped to Mastodon we'd be seeing something very different. TBH I'm mildly surprised that we didn't see more record labels standing up instances. It's always boggled me that people have just trusted the service desperately trying to be known as "X" as an authority on identity.
Threads has close ties with Instagram
(Threads uses opt-out ActivityPub.)
Edit: It's actually opt-in.
Because they'd heard of them.
The power of the fediverse is nothing next to the power of the normieverse and a couple of billion dollars in advertising money.
Permanently Deleted
Lula being active on Bluesky might have helped
Those people are just crazy.
Too hairy.
I found it tiresomely political and strangely dogmatic way too much of the time. I didn’t get the impression that there was a wide cross-section of people on there.
There are a lot of people I follow who moved to Mastodon, that now appear to have moved to Bluesky (I'm seeing posts on there from people I know used to post on Mastodon).
I'm not sure why. If I move over it'll be because everybody else is there. At the moment I'm not using it much.
@dch82 mastodon can't go mainstream because its emphasis on decentralization is too prominent in its communication, which complicates its adoption
However, modern social networks can still stand out, provided that federation is natural and not explicitly mentioned—similar to how Threads operates currently
Maybe it is just avoiding big tech.
Fediverse sounds too much like metaverse so people assume it’s crypto bullshit
the later those outlook, iphone and windows11 using ppl find a good home in a more guarded environment. makes fediverse a place that can grow. it is not mature yet as we all can see when looking at defederation drama. in the end you will be able to choose between the fully federated network or a "super" app like weechat.
People dumb.
"Everyone"? I know exactly zero people that have admitted to having a Bluesky account, but I know plenty that have an Mastodon etc. one.
I think this is at most a very regional or specific user bubble thing, and official user numbers for these commercial services are never trustworthy.
People love corporations