What’s the difference between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Misskey?
What’s the difference between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Misskey?
64 comments
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Misskey and Mastodon are two different types of open-source software for running a social media microblogging website that can interact with each other through the ActivityPub standard.
Bluesky is a similar but incompatible software run by a single company that was founded by ex-Twitter employees and is funded by billionaires and cryptocurrency scammers.
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Any significant reason to make an account with Mastodon vs. Misskey (or I seem to remember the latter having several forks?)?
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It's the culture of an instance that makes the difference, not which software it runs, but there is often a correlation. Misskey tends to get more people who appreciate cute emoji and comfy vibes.
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I prefer Misskey (Misskey fork at least) because it's just much more feature rich, Mastodon doesn't even have quotes, on the other hand Misskey has a lot of cool stuff like markdown, more customization, avatar decorations, emoji reactions etc But to each their own, from minuses Misskey has it's own API so the variety of apps is smaller compared to Mastodon
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The main draw of Mastodon for me (and why I didn't stick with the *key servers) is following hashtags. Really eases post discovery in an algorithm free world.
Otherwise the misskey forks have all manner of neat features to make using them a delight.
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I've never used Misskey but used various Misskey forks for about a year. I ended moving back to Mastodon. In my experience, the forks are very good at all the extra razzle dazzle they add (MFM, emoji reacts, drive, etc.) but often aren't as good at the basics. I'd pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried. I found that stuff more of a minor nuisance at first but it got pretty old over time. It's been a few months since I migrated back, so some or all of those issues could be fixed or improved by now too.
Also, app support isn't great. I think most of the forks implement basic Mastodon support now that will allow most apps to work. But the downside is you only get Mastodon functionality in those apps and not the extras.
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@poVoq @VanHalbgott You should brush up your knowledge of Bluesky. It has become open source. People have started to write plugins for it and people run their own instances that federate. And there is also a bridge to ActivityPub.
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Self hosted instances are artificially limited to 10 accounts, however https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
And that's only the frontend "server" that can be self hosted, the "relay", that's more equivalent to a mastodon instance, doesn't seem to be self hostable.
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Wasn't it founded by the original founder of Twitter, not ex-employees? Not that it makes much difference...
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Afaik it was an internal project at Twitter at first that was spunn off as a seperate company some time before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Jack Doresy only invested some start capital and was a board member for a while.
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Bluesky is a corporate hedge to delay the social network business from becoming not a business, it is headed by variously naive or disengenous tech people who believe they are creating the future when they are mercenaries for the past.
You know when you see oil company commercials and they have lots of footage of wind turbines, solar panels and other ecofriendly crap? That is bluesky.
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That's actually... quite accurate.
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This strategy has been working pretty great for oil companies. They've managed to extend their existence for decades.
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While true, covering up fundamental faults to keep afloat is hardly an example of best practice.
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Bluesky is a corporate hedge to delay the social network business from becoming not a business, it is headed by variously naive or disengenous tech people who believe they are creating the future when they are mercenaries for the past.
That's a great sounding description.
It's too bad we can't add it to their about about page.
I personally lean towards disingenuous though. Tech oligarchs and their lackeys are many things, but not naive.
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Mastodon is your coworker who’s honestly well-meaning and kind, but seems to have fits of upset for seemingly no reason at all and random beefs and drama with people that arise from nothing at all. She’s not very good at her job, but she can get it done, and she seems like a sincerely good person, which is enough that people like her.
Misskey is the employee who’s incredibly efficient, but has her own system that no one else can make sense of or follow. You have to just let her do things the way she wants to do them, but it all works. She does not hang around with anyone, just comes in and does her thing.
Bluesky is the guy who is always talking buddy-buddy while either wasting time or asking people for things, blows coke in the bathroom, is constantly hyping himself up. He seems to be very qualified, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is an act, and he’s also clearly a huge piece of shit. For some reason he is wildly popular with everyone.
You didn’t ask, but Bonfire is the IT guy who seems to live in his windowless office, wears T-shirts to work, speaks to no one, and is personally responsible for about 40% of the company’s products and services. Most people have no idea who he is.
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I really like the way you described Mastodon compared to all the other platforms.
Keep up the good work.
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Adding random information regarding Misskey. Misskey is specifically created to tackle Japanese internet culture and its own interpretation of fediverse.
For example, Misskey software allow the instance owner to run ads (usually community ads like promoting indie games, open for art illustration, or vtuber) while Western-made fediverse software are anti-ads.
Misskey also allows a lot of fun feature like social games, blogs, groups, emoji reaction, Misskey-flavored Markdown (people are getting wild with it).
It also have drive, which allow user to reuse existing uploaded image without using additional server storage.
Also, fun achievements!
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Misskey is way more interactive. Dang!
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Can English only speaking users use Miskey on a practical level. It sounds really interesting.
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There are Misskey forks, though not without some hiccups. I'm currently using Sharkey because I like the UI better and the emoji reactions. Calckey turned Firefish was big for a while, and the suddenly died when the sole Dev went MIA.
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Yes there several english-speaking instances running Misskey or a fork. Here's the list for Sharkey - https://fedidb.org/software/sharkey
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https://itsfoss.com/bluesky-vs-mastodon/ This is a comparison about Mastodon vs Bluesky.
Misskey is most similar to Mastodon. Bluesky is also a bit similar to both but still the most different one from the other two. All three are different social networks. Mastodon and Misskey are ActivityPub compatible, meaning they can "speak with" other ActivityPub compatible social networks, e.g. Lemmy, Pixelfed or PeerTube. Together, that's what's called the Fediverse (different federated social networks being able to talk to each other). Bluesky is based on a similar, but different protocol called AT Protocol. It also means it's possible for social network services using this protocol to be compatible to each other. But not sure if it's there in practice yet, if there are even other social networks using this, and so on.
I'd recommend using Mastodon, and in general ActivityPub compatible social network services. They're all open source, anyone can host a server (which is very important, because if the server operator ever does any bullsh!t you're not forced to stay there and still can remain on the social network, just from a different node), they're federated (servers can talk to each other and usually do unless some specific servers are blocked on purpose by the other server), and they're compatible with multiple services also using the same protocol. And there are "big" networks already existing using ActivityPub, most notably Mastodon and Lemmy of course. Also, Meta's Threads is also using ActivityPub, however some Mastodon instance hosts have decided to block Meta's servers (there are good reasons for doing so but explaining this would make this post even longer).
Bluesky is controlled by a company made by ex-Twitter employees, I think its federation capabilities are still limited right now(?), and one can't be so sure how its future is going to look like under these circumstances. We've all seen what happened to Twitter after Musk bought it, so I think only the true, unrestricted open source social network platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Loops.video, PeerTube and so on are the future.
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Mastodon and miskey are interface's to the same open public protocol.
Bluesky is another, largely private, twitter like microblog. That can, but may never in a significant sense allow something close to what the fediverse does.
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Now that's a very openly worded question. I could even answer "their logos" lol
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Misskey's a vibrant colorful very interactive experience
Bluesky's a very good Twitter alternative, at least for now, although it's owned by a VC-funded startup so we'll see how long that lasts
Mastodon (and even moreso forks like Glitch and Hometown) are good if you want a small-to-medium size community along with the ability to be part of broader conversations. It can be a decent Twitter alternative for some people (especially white techies) but Bluesky's a lot more usable, easy to get started on, and diverse.
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