Bluesky now has 30 million users.

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I feel like the reason the reason why it's taking off so much is because it's not federated.

It's like people hear the term federation and they get afraid. I know it's not that simple but still.

In other words, people don't know what they actually need.

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Active user numbers is probably less than 1 million, but still, 30 million accounts created is quite likely pretty good even if most of them aren't active.

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People are not afraid of the term “Federation.“ They literally have no clue what it is.

It’s the instance concept I find consistently to be an issue.

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Im one of them

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It’s something, but there’s really no frame of reference to know if it’s good or how good. Because few companies ever report this number. Twitter might have billions of accounts created if we look at all time.

Actives are what count.

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Yeah I was confused on if it was connected, if I was explaining it to myself id say that the fediverse has interconnected forums that all serve the same content and can be accessed by making accounts on different websites or apps.

Lemmy, mbin, piefed, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected forum/threads side of the fediverse.

Mastodon, sharkey, plaroma, etc. are all ways to access the interconnected microblogging slide of the fediverse.

They all have different features, like mbin has account reputation, piefed has topics which let you sub to multiple related communities at once, etc., but the content is shared between those that serve the same type of content.

Since they're all built ontop of the same protocol ppl can always come in and build on top of it or make hybrids while still letting everyone access the same content. Like mbin having both microblogging (tweets) and threads, letting you post and view both from the same account/website.

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And it legit takes 5 minutes to sign up for 5 instances and see the differences, mine showed the same content for the most part, only lemmy.world was missing the piracy community, other than that it was all the same and any nervousness I had about it went away after seeing the feeds being the same.

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Which of those are not “advertising” of one sort or another? Twitter was a dumb idea to start and I still just don’t see any appeal.

FB had my friends (now is a stupid cesspool of echo chamber idiocy.

Insta was photo-based FB Lite.

Fark>Slashdot>Digg>Reddit>Lemmy was/is about community and sharing of ideas and thoughts. Each had its own strengths and weaknesses, but the anonymity gave everyone an equal opportunity to participate.

The early days of Twitter seemed to be 10,000 people yelling in a room and nobody listening. Then celebrities took over and companies followed. Enshittifying it early on in the process.

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On Mastodon I have no trouble interacting with other users there. I have 2 accounts running on different instances - one global and one local. No trouble at all finding an account on either of them.

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I don't personally think it's because of that. Sure, federation as a concept outside of email has a bit of a messaging problem for explaining it to newbies, but... everyone uses email, and knows how that works. This is identical, just with it being posts instead of emails. Users aren't averse to federation, in concept or practice.

Bluesky was directly created as a very close clone of Twitter's UI, co-governed and subsequently pushed by the founder of Twitter himself, who will obviously have more reach than randoms promoting something like Mastodon, and, in my opinion, kind of just had better branding.

"Bluesky" feels like a breath of fresh air, while "Mastodon" just sounds like... well, a Mastodon, whatever that makes the average person think of at first.

So when you compare Bluesky, with a familiar UI, nice name, and consistent branding, not to mention algorithms, which Mastodon lacks, all funded by large sums of money, to Mastodon, with unfamiliar branding, minimal funding, and substantially less reach from promoters, which one will win out, regardless of the technology involved?

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Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.

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Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that's probably way less for many people.

Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn't happen, I'm betting it'll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days..

So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users.. I'm glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I'm sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.

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What... are you talking about?

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Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.

I've also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it's a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important...

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I tried Mastodon two times in the past. I love the idea of federation and really want it to work. There's just too much friction though.

First you have to choose an instance. If there isn't a sensible default preselected when you download an app you already lost almost all non-technical people.

But I'm a technical, motivated individual, so I managed. Next I wanted to follow some creators I know. I couldn't just look them up, I had to find them on twitter or other places and manually copy their name@instance or whatever into mastodon.

Cool. Now I can press follow and it'll follow, right? Wrong. I press follow and nothing happens. I find out It's pending? I'm guessing both instances have to accept federation between them?

Let's follow some more creators I know. What do you mean I can't follow someone because their instance is straight up blocked by my instance because their instance mods think everything anime-related is for pedos? So I can't follow creators from both instances because they don't like each other? So I need to find an instance which isn't blocked by anyone, doesn't block anyone? Or host my own one person instance and hope other instances accept my federation?

At this point you already lost 99.9% of people. I want mastodon to work, but it straight up sucks.

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I never actually used Twitter, but recently made accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed.

Pixelfed has been my favorite of the three so far... I'm finding that the image-based focus means my feed is mostly fun stuff, that leaves me feeling happy, not gloom and doom of news, snark, etc.

I'm not sure how long I'll use Mastodon, but I've been finding hashtags and users that I'm interested in following and interacting with, and the keyword filters have allowed me to limit (but not eliminate) the depressing stuff.

Bluesky pissed me the fuck off since I couldn't find a way to follow hashtags, only users, and the Lists thing was just not what I wanted either. Bluesky's filter is disappointing compares to Mastodon's too, since Mastodon allows you to hide filtered words behind a content warning or hide them completely, while Bluesky seems to only hide them completely.

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Exactly, it's just packaged in a way that consumers are more familiar with with the backing of major celebs

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Bluesky now has 30 million users.