Recently I’ve dove a little deeper into the Fediverse. I began with Mastodon like many others and I’m ready to move on. Mastodon as a software in comparison to similar services in the Fediverse like Calckey/Firefish, Friendica, Misskey, etc. just isn’t as good and the only thing it has going for it is an established user base and simplicity/lack of feature creep I guess. I’ve also had major difficulty finding any sort of conversation or getting followers, although that could just be because of me just not being really active on social media in general and being disinterested in discussing the most popular topics like politics.
I’ve been looking at another microblogging/Twitter type service to switch over to since I just like the concept of the Fediverse (I credit Kbin for being a great 2nd impression) but its been a struggle. It seems like in the microblogging space of the Fediverse, there are just a bunch of different platforms that do the same thing while trying to one up each other in some aspect. I’m not sure if there are large features that separate them besides UI, but this is just how it appears. If there is, please let me know.
This fragmentation is making it difficult to choose a platform, and I can’t imagine it’d be any easier for anyone new the Fediverse. Once I choose a platform, I have to choose an instance as well of course. I was going to join calckey.social/firefish.social but I’m a little hesitant now because mastodon.art defederated with it, and I follow multiple accounts from that instance. The drama that always surrounds defederation is a fundamental design flaw in the Fediverse, but I try to choose servers that don’t have these issues as I would rather not self-host right now. The Mastodon instance I have an account on has a great admin that lets the users decide when it came to a large move such as defederating with Threads.
I’m really beginning to see how the Fediverse can be complicated for new users, even if they understand the underlying technology. Unfortunately, these seem to just be deep problems with the Fediverse in general rather than just things to adjust to.
Anyway, enough ranting and back the question: which of these microblogging platforms should I even choose? Its making my head spin. Seems like Calckey would be the best for my needs at the moment.
Kinda true. But fwiw the folks who built twitter know a thing or two about scale and discoverability. I haven’t really dug into The Mastodon implementation, nor the AT protocol of bluesky, nor ActivityPub of Mastodon. But the twitter API was decent, and I bet they’ve learned some lessons.
So while I’m on Mastodon mostly on principal, I imagine that bluesky can offer a few advantages for both users and hosts.
I don’t doubt they know things the devs of Mastodon don’t, and from the ways the winds are blowing they seem like the next big bet. But their priorities with Bluesky seem like they’re in the wrong place. The fact that virtually everything is public (including things like blocklists) makes me worry about the future of privacy on the platform. Though I have the same issues with Threads given that it’s run by Meta with its eternal quest to doxx all their users.
I’m their defense, blocks need to be public in federated systems like bluesky and Mastodon, because the various servers need to know that the block exists in order to respect it.
Gotcha, still new to Fediverse stuff so not sure how all of it works.
Honestly same here. I don’t know what kind of caveats come with what I just said - I actually got it from the bluesky release notes, and then looked up what blocking on Mastodon involves (for instance, it hides your content from them when they view public timelines), and I suspect they have the same issues bluesky has (probably keeping blocklists in sync between instances). There are ways to keep it private, but they come with tradeoffs that may make federation either harder or make blocking less reliable.