EU medicines agency quits X, moves to Bluesky

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This is my biggest issue with discourse on here or Reddit. If something isn't literally perfect it's treated as being absolutely horrible.

I'll take minor improvements here and there over sticking to something awful and endlessly complaining about it.

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Too Bad it wasn't Mastodon. They just chose a different corporate master

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The distance between 'seeking perfection' and 'lowering personal standards' can be far. Let's make sure one isn't leaving an abusive relationship for another one.

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The level of effort to move to mastodon is not that much more than moving the bluesky. I agree not letting perfect be the enemy of good but this is a situation where they could have done something substantially better with only slightly more effort.

Am I glad they left Twitter? Sure.

Is there anything wrong with bluesky? Not right now.

Even if they moved to a managed mastodon instance, it would have been better.

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Swapping Twiddle-Dum with Twiddle-Dumber

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Yes. Once a large enough concentration of users is achieved, the network effect kicks in and the users are locked in.

With that amount of users, it becomes a juicy target for businesses who colonize the place to milk said users. That's assuming the original founders haven't already been kicked out and replaced by suits who just invite businesses, influencers, creators, propagandist and so on in and charge them for the privilege. That locks in businesses.

With users and business both locked in, squeeze them for an they're worth until the pain gets too big and the users leave for another platform. Go to step 1.

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It surprises me that bringing the server in house especially for emergency services isn't a priority.

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Mastodon as a mass market solution has failed. It's essentially irrelevant outside of a tiny niche

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What are you talking about? It has a million active users. With an advertising budget of zero.

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Of course it will. That's why BlueSky is just a stepping stone.

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I'm on Mastodon, and while it's not much more effort to move to, it's certainly:

Less featured
More complicated
Practically unheard of
Lacking in users (unsurprisingly this one is absolutely crucial)

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I wanted to leave Twitter too. I'm a professional engineer in tech and I found setting up in Mastodon to be... ...not straightforward, as did a whole load of other people. I eventually got set up. I couldn't find anyone or anything, the whole model being based around local instances rather than users or topics but.. I tried to make the best of it and I followed the other people who had left Twitter that I had followed there when they said where to find them on Mastodon. Then I found I had run into a 'silencing' drama where some other instance admins had taken issue with an admin for the instance I was signed up to and as a result everyone on my instance was essentially shadowbanned in a whole load of other places. It had been happening maybe a month before I even found out about this. I'm a grown up, I don't have time for school time drama. I found that I was using Mastodon less and less and so were the people I had been following. Then my BlueSky invite came through. I can find topics and I can find users. People post and people respond. I don't have to worry which of 100 identical usernames across different instances is the 'real' one or my instance being defederated or silenced.

The problem with Mastodon is it's basically a social network for people who are into Mastodon, and enjoy centering around their specific instance. It might work for Warcraft guilds but it doesn't work for me, or any of the people or topics I want to follow, ostly current affairs and tech. As opposed to BlueSky which is a social network for people who:

Want to move on from twitter
Are interested in finding and following people and or topics

No doubt at this point you will want to tell me how I'm all wrong, clearly tech illiterate and how Mastodon has at least as many users as BlueSky. Sure, whatevs. It's like Linux on the Desktop, not a viable mass-market proposition at this point (saying this with 25 years Linux desktop experience).

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I'm not sure we are having the same conversation. You are talking about how Mastodon was not a good fit for you personally, maybe because of a bad server.

I'm saying that lots of people use it for all sorts of great things, and it's an excellent option for a public health agency.

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EU medicines agency quits X, moves to Bluesky