Bluesky now has 30 million users.

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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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I wonder how many of the 30 million accounts are bots.

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I agree that defederation is vastly overused, and simple account migration should be a priority.

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Yeah but people don’t want to set up 5 accounts to join alt-reddit. They want to down a clean app that takes seconds to set up and just go. Friction is friction.

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The only thing the Fediverse is missing is way to migrate from 1 instance to another

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they should understand by the 2nd one, I just wasnt sure where I wanted to commit, it became fun by the 2nd one to pick an instance like a club

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there really isnt much friction either if you dont cate about piracy otherwise id have stayed on lemmyworld when vyjr reccomended it, they really just need to try it, I complained until I tried it

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Bluesky is like Twitter but with about 1/10th the idiots, and no mechanism that the idiots can elevate their racist, moronic hot takes above other comments.

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Cruel pragmatism meets naive idealism. A tale as old as time.

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But even then you have to explain the whole subscribed vs local vs all situation. Then defederation, so they know that there is stuff they can’t access without creating another account on another instance.

No matter how much we simplify it it’s simply not that simple. At least not compared to traditional social media. And we can sit here and call them lazy for not learning how it works or we can do more to try to meet people where they’re at

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I don't think 99% of people who have joined bluesky have any clue what federation is or means. They do know what "not twitter" is however.

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Not only do I don't mind multiple instances, I welcome it. It's a feature for me, not a bug. But having to create multiple accounts is a no-no and what keeps people away. People say you only need one but that's not true if you want to be active in multiple instances.

If the fediverse had a way to unify account creation, that would be a game changer. It's pretty much what's holding the fediverse down, be it Lemmy, Pixelfed, PeerTube, etc. It's frustrating because without that limitation I could see the corpos being given a run for their money.

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Bluesky now has 30 million users.