Bluesky is currently gaining more than 1M users a day

Highly recommend folks check out Mastodon as well - fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

It is continuing to grow steadily and has tons of activity compared to a few years ago.

https://joinmastodon.org/

why isn't mastodon one of the winners like bluesky?

Mastodon is confusing for non-technical users, while Bluesky is pretty much a drop-in replacement for Twitter.

mastodon is federated, not decentralized

> fully decentralized, no ads, no algo, no corporate control.

No one owns it so there’s no team of well paid professionals trying to make it grow.

Try using it, it has extra steps and decisions that add friction and are annoying / challenging for end-users.

Federated and no control just means it’s going to be overrun by trolls at some point?

I appreciate Mastodon and wish it were growing steadily. Unfortunately, activity metrics (see the second chart on this page, for example [0]) suggest that it's on a steady, slow decline.

[0] https://mastodon-analytics.com/

And beyond that, the federated aspect makes it very different from a global site like twitter. It was aimed at having control but in doing so you feel disconnect IMHO.

It did see a big surge in popularity when Musk bought Twitter, but user numbers right now are not growing significantly.

It's not idiot-proof. Common-denominator platforms where you're expecting the general population need to be intuitive and work like people expect them to. Mastodon doesn't and their federated model is a pain in the behind.

Its fundamental design lacks the ability to provide features that many people want, because the developers see those features as anti-features to be avoided.

Bluesky's AT Protocol was developed specifically to address what they saw as shortcomings with the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon and other similar services.

I consider myself a technical person, perhaps not social media savvy anymore, and Mastodon confused the hell out of me. I don't think it stands a chance with regular Joe.

It's a worse experience for posters for two major reasons: blocking is not as effective (blocked people can still read and respond), and there are too many weird scolds who yell at people for not adding content warnings for trivial things.

I don't post so it doesn't affect me directly. It affects where the people I follow choose to post.

Probably not. Each server has its own moderation, and servers that tolerate bad behavior from their users get blocked by most other servers.

I'm not sure the current model would do well against a large coordinated manipulation campaign, but it handles isolated trolls at least as well as corporate social media.

Because you can go to Bluesky and click “Sign Up” without a confusing explanation about instances.

I see a plateau after a bunch of churn from large waves of migrations. Would be surprised if this won't be the case for bsky.

Regardless of MAU count, there's plenty happening there to keep me active, and you get to see Threads users who speak ActivityPub as well as Bsky users via a bridge.

Good question. When you say Mastodon, my answer is 'which one' or 'which instance'?

That basic hurdle is the reason why it is a barrier to many potential new users and it has traded complexity over ease of onboarding when trying to sign up new users (who are not techies or sys-admins).

One solution is to set a default instance. I.e 'mastodon.social' and tell users to sign up there. Again, that increases the issue of centralization. To prevent that, you close sign ups and tell users to sign up elsewhere. Then the issue continues on other instances.

Along side other issues, that is why new users just went to Bluesky or Threads instead.

Don’t forget nostr!

I signed up to Fosstodon and then followed a bunch of Python and Django folks. This has been great so far, and my feed is full of relevant, interesting posts. I see a lot of posts complaining about Mastodon and pointing to its decline, but for my use-case, I get a lot of value from it and am pretty happy. I'm not sure what benefits I would get by moving over to Bluesky?

This. Nostr could learn from this too.

This isn't the most important reason, but compared to similar web sites, Mastodon's user experience is awkward.

No corporate control. Server admin block nodes they don't want to see, so it is important to join a server with similar views as your own, or run your own server.

I wonder how the world would change if ads just disappeared

I get things have to be sold but damn it's out of control

They probably are, but they don’t have a marketing team like BlueSky does

I joined Mastodon in the big post-Elon user exodus. It’s great for geeky stuff, but Bluesky is much better for entertainment and news (i.e. what I mostly used Twitter for, pre-Elon).

If geeky stuff is what you’re interested in, you can build that community on Mastodon easily. But if you want more popular content and users, they’re on Bluesky.

federation is a form of decentralization

that's a yikes from me

Nobody take the bait

Mastodon has a big honkin' "Join mastodon.social" button both on joinmastodon.org and in the mobile apps to solve this exact problem.

It's fundamentally reasonably capable of things like full text search and better discovery, which its lead dev and much of the community see as anti-features. There has been some recent progress on search, but being searchable is opt-in only because many users are opposed to search.

I think decisions like that are an active choice not to become popular.

If anybody is wondering what sort of political viewpoints quantadev is talking about, one example is they posted that The Onion and Alex Jones are the same

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42138285

Life without Pihole and a blocker is just grim.

Every so often I get exposed to that world. It’s awful.

Yeah, boring old trope.

Good solution. Problem is they have chosen a 'default instance' in the app which goes against the idea to encourage federation of the platform and instead accelerates centralization and there was backlash over that change. [0]

mastodon.social will only get more centralized and is the only one that is benefitting from that change.

[0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677

But the fact they still have this perception of confusing sign-up means they were too late.

They already had 8 years to overrun it.

Most people haven't heard of Fediverse, so it's a New Trope to them.

You don’t get trolls unless you have a lot of people on there already.

I love having "followers" like you, jrflowers. Did you ever figure out how to setup that URL that pulls up just my posts?

A lot of free services would disappear if they were unable to make some sort of ad-based income. Some people would be unable to do anything except whatever was provided by their government without ad-supported services (thinking Google products, YouTube, etc.) It would eventually go back to the way it was in the old days - a few actually-useful-but-struggling sites, a few paid-for services that might or might not survive, a passel of vanity sites and some incoherent cranks and weirdos (Time Cube, etc.).

Heaven for some, but mostly boring for everyone else after an hour.

It's probably a bit more work than a lot of trolls are willing to put in. Trolling doesn't require a lot of thought or creativity, but setting up the infrastructure does.

This site doesn’t have followers but if you see somebody POSTING in the VOICE of a guy wearing a sandwich board that says CHRIST WAS A LIZARD it only takes two clicks to see the other stuff they voluntarily posted publicly here (username -> comments)

That's very nice. Being from the Conservative-run city of Dallas, I've personally never seen a sandwich-board in real life.

I don't click random, likely dangerous links, but it's good to see you've been rendered speechless. I like that.

that is fair, it's amazing how YouTube can eat a big file for free so you can have other people watch it, no storage cost concern

edit: I'm more talking about the influence on people's minds whatever the ad is in particular the bad ones/narrative

I would use PiHole, but them using Github is just a nonstarter (notably because that might be one of the websites I'm considering blocking, catch22 for blocklist updates). Or have they finally moved somewhere else less morally bankrupt ?

It's not like storage is particularly expensive unless you start to have hundreds of hour-long videos...

Speaking of, one of the things that the 2012 Twitter APIpocalypse killed off, was Flattr 1.0 (with its buttons on websites to Flattr stuff so at the end of the month the sum of money you set away would be spread over all the Flattrs you made).

My impression from conversations here is that the AT protocol largely came from the developers being unaware of how they could've achieved the same thing with no or minimal extensions to ActivityPub. There may or may not be actual benefits to the protocol, but they could have achieved a far smaller delta and largely kept interoperability without any major sacrifices.

They already had millions of people to troll.