Hey, I wanted to ask someone who has probably more knowledge than me about it - what’s the difference about these two services? I know Mastodon has ActivityPub, so it works with Lemmy, and BlueSky has it’s own kind of federation, but does it even has anything to federate to?
I’m asking not which one is better, I’m searching logical argument for one or other. I’m obviously more leaning toward Mastodon since I’m here, but I wanted to give my friend, who is thinking about joining, some real arguments.
Bluesky isn’t federated (another privately owned monolith that’s promised it’s coming Soon™) and recently got funding from a company with “blockchain” in its name (and there’s already rumors that despite claims otherwise, ads will be showing up in the next year or so)
that being said, Bluesky does offer much better blocking, muting, and moderation options than Mastodon (Mastodon devs have been digging in their heels) as well as better on-boarding and curated follow lists
Search and discovery are a big deal. It’s much less effort to find people and content, and to be found on Bluesky than on Mastodon/ActivityPub. It takes work on Mastodon, and I don’t think Pleroma, Misskey, and their forks are doing much better (though I believe Akkoma has a decent search function).
This is, in part because there is a very vocal contingent of ActivityPub users who do not want working search and discovery. I think that’s equivalent to saying they don’t want the network to gain mainstream popularity.
It does look like it’s possible to independently host all the components of the ATProto network now, so I’m hoping we’ll see a bunch of services pop up soon such that the network becomes more resistant to enshittification. I’ve seen Whitewind and Frontpage, but I don’t fully understand the federation model and haven’t been able to cause one to display posts from another.
Wtf? Not being able to find shit that I saw a few days ago on Lemmy drives me nuts. It’s not like I remember which community on which instance I saw it. Why would we not want good search?
I’m not going to make a very good case for a position I consider terribly misguided, but in short it’s because trolls on other platforms search for terms related to people they want to harass.
Some people have also raised objections centered around privacy or consent to process data. I find that misguided too; ActivityPub is radically public in that it sends every action to a bunch of other peoples’ computers, and there’s no explicit consent to do any of the other stuff a server might do with posts.
Of course any server owner can just
select * from statuses where text like '%search string%'.
Bluesky is the first app built on the ATProtocol, its protocol for federation, sort of like how Mastodon was among the first to use ActivityPub after the overcomplexity of OStatus. The ATProtocol is a few years younger than ActivityPub, so its landscape isn’t fleshed out yet. Currently Bluesky caters more towards creators, artists, and social togetherness, whereas ActivityPub tends to lean harder into attracting techies. Both protocols can be run as independent instances, but most people are still using bsky.social for now until more instances pop up and federate together. The process for hosting a Bluesky instance is still undergoing development, but all features of it have been opened up. There exist multiple bridge systems that can interweave ActivityPub with ATProto.
https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/entries/Notes on Running a Full-Network atproto Relay (July 2024)
Is ATProtocol as open as ActivityPub in terms of content? Could there be a Bluesky equivalent of Peertube, for example?
Yes, assuming video content is stored across decentralized PDS instances
Blue sky is for people who want something that works. Mastodon is for people who think they know how to make it work.
Two of my friends who hate elmo and his version of twitter didnt stick with mastodon and they’re a senior developer and a sys admin, but now they’re both on bluesky. I no longer think the fediverse is too hard for people, I think people don’t want to deal with the way it works. The user expirence and onboarding in the fediverse is simply outclassed by, well everything more popular than it.
Unfortunately, fair point, yeah. I wish it weren’t like this. I’m here, and both those places, and I have to say that my engagement with BlueSky is far higher. That said, Lemmy and Mastodon have the potential to be something very special.
Bluesky is cool and trendy. Mastodon isn’t.
Damn. I knew I belonged on Mastodon but you didn’t have to be so blunt about it…
To be fair, Bluesky has been a really good and positive experience for me so far. And I’ve used Mastodon and Twitter.
I keep trying to want to use Mastodon. But I’m using Bluesky far more. Heck, maybe more than here at this point, just because it’s been so…refreshingly positive.
And I had absolutely no interest in Twitter at any point.
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TL/DR Mastodon server admins have a great amount of control on who you can follow. Searches may not find everyone due to defederation. Bluesky puts the control for this in the users’ hands with more robust search and moderation tools.
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Bluesky is growing as is Threads. I’ve read several articles over the past week and not one stated Mastodon is gaining users.
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I’ve been on Mastodon for a couple of years and, for me, it’s so boring. Been on Bluesky for about a week. I currently have more followers and am following more than I ever did on Mastodon.
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Mastodon was setup with the idea of users would use hashtags to find people to follow but I’ve noticed half the posts have no hashtags. I’ve also seen a lot of hashtag abuse to reach a wider audience - hashtags being added to a post that has nothing to do with the topic. An example is #privacy being added to a painting of a beach.
There are followlists (called Starter Packs) for different topics and occupations. Lawyers, teachers, privacy enthusiasts (me), AI reachers, anyone really can find a group of people to follow that share your interests. These are created by users, not the company.
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With Mastodon being federated if you block someone and they move to another server, you need to block them again. This isn’t good for someone being abused by a stalker.
They don’t mess around with blocking trolls “Don’t feed the trolls” could be the site motto.
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You could be on a server that gets defederated or have someone blocked from your searches by the owner of your server. This will limit who you can follow.
Bluesky puts this control back in your hands. There are blocklists to make it easier to remove the maga, nazis, rightwingers, cryptobros, etc from your sight. Moderation tools are far easier to use. Muting of hashtags can be done from the Discover timeline.
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Bluesky is very left leaning which I’m not sure I like. An example, the other day there was a thread about using blocklists and a user said they are silly because you have to trust the creator of that list. Another user said talk like that will get you blocked, many people agreed with the second user. That culture worries me. BTW I agree with the first user.
Bluesky is very left leaning which I’m not sure I like. An example, the other day there was a thread about using blocklists and a user said they are silly because you have to trust the creator of that list. Another user said talk like that will get you blocked, many people agreed with the second user. That culture worries me. BTW I agree with the first user.
How is this an example of “left leaning”?
US Republicans have successfully pushed a narrative that the left is “all about censorship”
And we’ll burn any books that say otherwise!
Yeah, I thought about that at work today. I should have said ‘Bluesky is developing a “group think” culture’.
I appreciate the self-reflection.
Thank you. I have to admit when I’m wrong. Doubling down is just cringe.
I’ve been on Mastodon for a couple of years and, for me, it’s so boring. Been on Bluesky for about a week. I currently have more followers and am following more than I ever did on Mastodon.
To me, that’s an argument for Mastodon.
Could just write your tweets in notepad you know. If you don’t want anyone to see what you do.
I’m definitely one of the people who is happy to contribute via comments, but have zero interest in having “Followers”. It’s going to be very rare that I have a brand new post worth ssubmitting and dont get any kind of domamine hit from building a “following” like a ton of people seem to.
That’s why community- and post-oriented systems like Lemmy/mbin and classic forums have always made way way more sense to me.
But for some reason i’m liking Bluesky. Can’t figure out why.
How did you know that??
Nah, I just think the whole ‘follower’ thing is weird.
To each their own.
You can block hashtags or words, and you can set a time period to do so. From an hour to forever.
This sums it up
Bluesky is the Microsoft Word of social media, which I mean in the derogatory sense, as the fediverse is the LaTeX of social media, which I also mean in the derogatory sense
Now I’m afraid to try and find bluesky meme communities. If it’s winword, any image must throw the whole thing into utter madness.
Bluesky is easy on the beginner and mimics X as a whole world in your single feed. Mastodon (fediverse) carry way to much technical concepts to understand and get the most out of it.
What do you need to understand about the technical concepts? Join an instance (mastodon.social if you have no reason to select another one), post and follow.
That’s where the first question woul pop up. Which instance to choose? What to consider when choosing? That’s where the first less technically inclined will already abort.
Just pick any, it doesn’t matter
That question would start a very long post. Let’s keep it simple:
- you may never find your communities again (hashtag ? what is that ? why should I hashtag to make it searchable and make it stick…)
- your posts may never reach your friends, or general audience (defederation, admin instance ban…)
- the global timeline is not a global timeline as in X or Bsky, or Insta or any other social media, just what your instance admin and federation relatations “agreed” to show you …
Why do you need to understand any of that? Now, none of it is wrong - but it’s not something anyone signing up at a Mastodon instance absolute must know about to use the system and have a good troll-free social network experience.
On the contrary. Maybe those are exactly the things needed to avoid becoming Xitter. Bluesky is rapidly becoming another instance of the hellhole at this very moment.
I agree on the unfortunate and predictable bluesky’s future. Corporate, politics, ads… Avoiding to become “Xitter” should not rely on end users computer knowledge, technical abilities, geeky mindset. I think you understand that too: KISS is a huge success factor. That’s just my 2cts.
I’ve been waiting for everyone around me to “understand computers” for forty years.
No luck. They’re just as clueless as they have ever been.
You’d think I’d be less boggled by it now, but nope.
Bluesky is the enshitification continuing. Sort of Mastodon on a single, godlike instance which they control…
Well by all accounts it sounds fine now as its own community. The problems of everything riding on one main instance/set of maintainers would be a problem in the future.
Things have not always gone well on the Fediverse and Lemmy, but we have been able to get through these problems thanks to the safeguards of federation and open source. E.g. Feddit.de broke and the original owner was nowhere to be found, but feddit.org was able to succeed it.
The difference is one is where people will continue going, the other is where people will continue crying because people won’t go.
Bluesky if you’re at all a normy, Mastodon if all you care about it Linux, News, and pedantry.
Is Mastodon Lemmy? Is bluesky Twitter alternative? I just want reddit alternative.
Mastodon has a certain level of federated connectivity with Lemmy, but it’s also a Twitter alternative, similar in that way to BlueSky. Lemmy (or mBin) is the Reddit alternative.
Mastodon is like if Twitter could read reddit, Instagram, and various other social media network posts as Tweets, except every social network is a much tinier version of it.
I think the biggest end user perspective difference between mastodon and Lemmy is mastodon is designed more for following people and organizations and the occasional hashtag topic like Twitter, Lemmy is closer to reddit in that is more organized for topics and communities where individual identities are less important, less people use legal names, etc. I also see more advertising on mastodon but that may just be an instance or moderator thing and not a general difference.
mbin is both Reddit and Twitter.
BlueSky is mastodon where the main instance has ads and a marketing team. Otherwise really similar.
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