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.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that “federation” there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon’s federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don’t and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky’s overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
Sure, but all of this basically comes down to poor marketing. It’s not an inherent problem with the technology or with the concept of federation.
It shouldn’t be surprising either given that Mastodon is a niche platform developed largely as a volunteer effort. The reason people advocating Mastodon tend to focus on stuff like on the flaws of the centralized social media is because that’s what matters to them. We see pretty much the same thing happening with Linux, and many other open source projects.
This is the point I was making above, BlueSky has a professional marketing team that understands how to sell their product to the general public. That’s the main reason BlueSky is gaining users at a faster rate.
Regarding the Gmail problem, it’s true that we could end up with one major instance most people are on. I don’t see that as a huge issue in practice since you can still choose use different instances. That’s a fundamentally better situation to be in.
For example, I don’t use Gmail and I run my own personal Mastodon instance using masto.host, this doesn’t stop me communicating with people on Gmail or major Mastodon instances like mastodon.social.
I mentioned Gmail because, when a single instances holds something like 95% of the users, that gives them a lot of power. If Gmail decided to de-federate from you… you are kinda screwed. That’s my concern. Although, as you said, that is still better than a fully centralized platform.
Sure, if a big instance started to dominate the fediverse it would be a form of centralization. However, the protocol being designed with federation in mind makes it much easier for people to migrate from that instance if it becomes a bad actor.
Going back to the original point though, I do think that fediverse could be marketed better in a way that would appeal to more people. Since we agree that federation is a desirable feature, the focus should be on figuring out how to explain it to people in a sensible way.
And that is the thing I have been struggling with and if the major instances looked visually distinct it would make it easier to not confuse them. But yeah, the fediverse has a marketing problem. We need to get people with marketing skills involved.