How is you experience using them ? (I know BlueSky is invite only, but perhaps someone got lucky) I registered in Mastodon recently and i’m getting the same feeling(and problems) when started using lemmy.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.
They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.
It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.
Mastodon has more of a community feel to me, whereas Bluesky feels like the traditional “shout into a void” like Twitter is.
Agree
I use both and much prefer Mastodon. As others have said, it’s more mature and the apps (of which there are many) are more polished. Bluesky is a bit glitchy and less feature rich. In fact, you still can’t mute phrases on Bluesky, which is a deal breaker for me.
Mastodon is harder to find people due to the federated nature, although some mobile apps such as Megalodon on Android and Ice Cubes on iOS do pull follower and following lists from remote instances which makes it easier to find people.
Bluesky is more like old Twitter, and many people who I’ve followed for years are on there. Trying to out quip each other. Mastodon is more friendly and I’ve found lots of interesting people to follow.
Culture wise I’d say that Bluesky feels a lot more like Twitter immediately before Musk took over - there’s lots of shitposting & also a lot of “look at me I’m so irreverent so please follow me” vibe to it. It’s easier to find people to follow but harder to find interesting content (on mastodon you can rely on hashtags). It’s also a lot harder to get engagement if you’re not a Twitter big name, there’s a lot more parasociality going on, with more focus on individual posters than on the actual content, which IMO is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.
Mastodon users tend to feel very earnest to a fault. The whole “you forgot to add a CW to your food pic you bastard” thing is unfortunately real, but I’ve mostly stopped seeing this since I put a warning on what I will and will not CW on my timeline. On the bright side, there’s a lot more friendly engagement from strangers. Politically, mastodon users as a whole lean left with a lot of socialists/anarchists but you can curate what you see. It also depends on what circles you follow, for example, I (as a Chinese speaker) stumbled on a huge community of Chinese users who are feminist and anti-CCP, but will probably not consider themselves leftists.
As a whole, I’ve mostly abandoned Bluesky in favor of Mastodon but that’s a personal preference - both are unlikely to completely replace Twitter & the landscape will likely remain fractured for a very long time so just choose the one that vibes with you.
what is a CW? I’m new to mastodon
CW stands for “Content Warning”. It’s a feature that allows users to hide their posts behind a warning message.
Some commonly used CWs include NSFW, Politics, Mental Health (Some times shortened to “MH”, often with a +/- depending on sentiment), Spoilers, Food, Alcohol/drugs, and flashing GIF/video.
…Food. Hmmm. Food?
I understand a warning for gore or nudity or fascism or whatever needing a content warning, but what exactly did food ever do to anyone?
I think it’s an attempt to be considerate of those with eating disorders?
Can you also unhide certain tags, I can see the value but at some point without that feature it could get really annoying.
The glitch-soc fork of Mastodon allows you to show or hide specific tags, yes.
Not op, but I believe it means Content Warning.
You explained it so much better than I could have.
OP - this nails it perfectly. This is exactly it. I’m starting to drift away from it after a few months and using Masto more (though I never stopped). YMMV, but this was/is my experience on Bluesky.
Bluesky Cons: doesnt have videos or gifs. Its glitchy. Doesnt federate. Has VC funding that they will have to repay with huge interest meaning they will start the enshittificatiom process and betray users’ wants by forcing ads and other nonsense.
Bluesky Pros: the usernames system is better imo. having just one @ and working as subdomains or using your domains. In the future i can see people just placing their bsky subdomain places so you can just click it and go straight to their account where as on mastodon you list on your @user@instance.name and then they have to go to their own instance and copy paste it in search and then click follow (assuming theyre not defederated).
The custom algorithms that you can make and share is a great feature. Signing in to third party apps and other services that use bluesky (like the clubhouse type app) lets tou use your same account and you easily make different passwords for each separate app by using the official app.
More artists are going to bsky than mastodon and the main art mastodon instance is run by an admin that seems to get into a bunch of drama and defederates from other instances often and based on whims with no input from the users.
Mastodon Cons: no custom algorithms, no explore/For You feature to discover new things you’re interested in. Hashtags are ugly and its annoying to follow a hashtag and see every post in the hashtag which can easily be spammed. I would much prefer to have a chronologically order timeline that I can customize to show me a suggested post after every 4 chronological posts and have the recommendations based on by likes, users i follow’s likes, and topics I manually input that it detects using text/image recognition in the posts.
Mastodon Pros: it federates, has no VC funding, works well with Lemmy and pixelfed, community feel and less dunking for likes, lots of third party apps, AGPL, lots of forks and community development.
Cons for both: Neither are good in keeping up with realtime updates on news and breaking events like twitter was
Pros for both: open source, not fully controlled by any one person/group, no elon, no ads, no ragefarming for views and ad dollars, no shady practices like slowing down links to competitors and websites the owner doesnt like, no shadowbanning keywords from search like twitter and threads does.
I personally use Mastodon and have used it for years and I very very rarely check Bluesky anymore. I do hope mastodon adopts the custom algorithms, app passwords, and username setup from Bluesky though
the custom algorithms feature and usernames is absolutely the killer features of bsky for me… they’re a really amazing idea!
but not using activitypub is unforgivable imo… i’m sure there will be bridges eventually, but… come on; that shouldn’t be necessary… when you’re trying to shift the entire human population to federated networks, you can’t just break out on your own. is it perfect? no… is it a bare minimum spec that allows you to build on it? absolutely!
What if ActivityPub simply couldn’t support some of the federation features they implemented, like using a domain as your handle?
activitypub at its core is incredibly simple afaik… its just a set of defined APIs and that follow ActivityStream schemas
the actual user identifiers we interact with in software aren’t the same as what activitypub uses internally (they’re all URIs so look more like https://///)
it wouldn’t be difficult to use a similar mechanism as they’re using right now to direct a particular domain or subdomain to a user ID: it’s all rewritten anyway!
Thanks for the detailed break down! One thing I really do miss about old Twitter is how easily I could get a huge variety of great news sources at the same place.
There were always problems with the site, but nothing has come close to that level of centralized convenience (that I’ve found so far at least). It may just be the new normal since that same centralization makes any site vulnerable to the same fate twitter has met with. But man I sure underestimated how much worse twitter could get…
I’d love to give bluesky a shot for a bit, but their invite policy has me disappointed having waited for nearly a year now without any sign of opening up for regular users like me. Mastodon is good, tildes better (but tiny) so far, but I still miss having all the journalists who cared about journalism practices in one place…
Sigh…
Use mastodon. After all the crap that has happened recently only a fool would still use a centralized social network.
Now that I’ve had the chance to try both (thanks to fisco@lemmy.ml), I can say that Mastadon seems more familiar to me as a former Twitter user. Despite being a Twitter spinoff, Bluesky seems to be trying to reinvent the flow of things. I’m not quite sure how hashtags (or their equivalent) work there.
I’m not sure which is better yet, as I’m too new to Bluesky to really form an opinion, but those are my initial impressions.
I’d like to see the National Weather Service and local government agencies start posting to one or both though, as weather and traffic are the only reasons I look at Twitter anymore, and I’d prefer not to support it at all.
Bluesky doesn’t have hashtags, but the algorithmic feeds are supposed to pick up on keywords that it deems relevant to the feed you’re subscribed to.
The problem with that is you will often get posts which are nothing to do with the topic of the feed, but they use a word which the algorithm thinks is relevant. I was subscribed to a general Gaming feed, and I would often see posts about Donald Trump, just because someone used the word “game” or “playing” in the post.
Another silly one was in a PlayStation feed, where I kept seeing posts from sex workers selling their content on a site called Clips4Sale. Because the URL has “ps4” written in the middle of it, it was added to the feed. 🤷
That sounds rife for “Manufacturing Consent” possibility. Like how the platform owners can just decide what you want to see like that. Yuck…
I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:
- They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
- They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
- They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
- They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.
Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.
More referring to when websites pushes certain kinds of content against the will of its users. Youtube pushes right wing content. Twitter and Reddit on that crypto bs. Facebook pushes disinfo and terrorism. There’s no benefit for doing things that way, they just do it because they can.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.
An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.
100% mastodon. bluesky is not open-source, so using it to seek refuge from twitter is like jumping from one frying pan into the next.
If you like Twitter before elon musk, bluesky is the same. I didn’t like Twitter even before elon musk. It’s pretty dystopian.
Having tried both, Mastodon feels more relaxed, more polished, easy to navigate, following hashtags, & pickup where you left off… Bluesky is in its infancy, & will probably get better… Have a couple of invite codes if anyone wants to check it out…
Gonna add one more to the people asking for an invite. I’ve been waiting on the wait list for months. Do you happen to have one more to spare?
As soon as I have another one, its yours👍🏼, have saved your comment so hopefully I won’t forget…😬
Thank you! Here’s hoping. 😊
Signed up months ago but still hoping to check it out. Not to pile on as another invite pest, but man twitter sure has become unusable lately!
Any chance you got invites back yet? I’m still interested!
Sent a DM 👍🏼
I’d love to check it out. I’ve been on the waiting list for months.
Sent a DM 👍🏼
If you have any more invite codes, I wouldn’t mind checking it out, as well. Just signed up for the waiting list yesterday.
Sent a DM 👍🏼
I’m guessing you are out of codes, but just in case, I’ve been on the waiting list since I first heard of it even before the Reddit exodus…
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
I suspect that if you ask lemmy users then they will go Mastodon because we tend to go “yay federation yay” but if you surveyed the same question somewhere else you would get a different answer.
Last time I tried Twitter you still had to pay your 20c for an sms to the site to get it published, and I never tried BS or Mastodon. I did like the shortness of the sms-based microblogging platform, but it didn’t stay that way.
I was on Mastodon starting soon after Musk bought twitter, and bluesky few the last few months. Mastodon is a lot more similar to lemmy in terms of being part of the fediverse, while bluesky sort of claims to be going for a federated thing of its own but so far is pretty much just a centralized server like twitter so far. Perhaps because of that, I find bluesky a lot more engaging and more similar to pre-Musk twitter. A lot of the choices the Mastodon creators implemented were deliberately reducing virality and “one big chatroom” feel that I at least liked about twitter. I wasn’t looking for those changes, just a microblogging social network not owned by fascists.
So basically if you want something like lemmy go with Mastodon, if you want something old twitter go with bluesky.
I like the idea of being able to following a hashtag on mastodon and have it show up in my home feed. Maybe I am just doing it wrong on BlueSky, but I couldn’t figure it out. There was something with lists, but it wasn’t working like I expected.
feeds on bluesky are actually a really cool idea! form what i understand, they’re meant to replace “the algorithm”: people can write and register code to curate posts for feeds, and other people can use those same feeds to filter posts (so the algorithm can be customised per user, open source, etc: it’s a choice… heck, you can have multiple so it’s multiple choices!)
that means it’s less likely someone can manipulate “the algorithm” because there’s no single algorithm! and you can filter your feed based on anything, rather than just simple things like tags
I love Mastodon, within the first year I’ve almost got the same amount of followers as I had on Twitter in 12 years. Plus on Mastodon, the people are nicer and talk back. Twitter felt like shouting for attention.
Also, I recently found out that BlueSky has no encryption or real security and it’s designed that way. Here’s a live stream of BlueSky, no login required.
