Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
I’m sad that a lot of people couldn’t perceive the mastodon in the room.
Mastodon isn’t a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.
Why is that?
From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation
Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.
Problem is there’s no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there’s not as much monetization of the users to fund it.
I’m perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there’s a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can’t run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.
Edit: I didn’t realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don’t think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.
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Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.
The Technology Connections guy (Alec) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:
My favorite thing about Bluesky is that I haven’t gotten a stream of notifications that I’ve been tagged in a post on a weird fork of the software which my client doesn’t parse correctly so I only see one side of a conversation.
I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.
It is. Autocorrect and bad proofreading. Thanks, fixed.
Jah, cool! Yeah there’s a whole other set of problems for people with real followings… Not good
Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.
On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.
I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don’t really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.
I do kind of like how it makes mastodon feel smaller since I cannot interact with or post quote replies, unlike Tumblr or Twitter. Those sometimes accrue millions of interactions. But it is a choice that will keep Mastodon small
Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.
The average user is unfortunately, still to this day, an idiot.
Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.
And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.
Mastodon does not have as many arbitrary restrictions for one.
Mastodon is a bi replacement for twitter.
Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.
Mastodon allows you to transfer your followers when you migrate, so it’s not a big deal if you change your mind about the first instance you had chosen.
You lost an average user at “instance”, long before “transferring an account”. It’s a big deal.
That may be true for someone just looking to sign up with no help, but if they come across a guide or if their friend helps them, then it’s easy.
So you agree with me. To succeed, a product shouldn’t require a guide or a friend’s help to install and configure it. I work in IT, yet I don’t see people around me bothering with all that. Now think of your relatives, friends, people you see every day on the street or in a mall - they couldn’t care less.
Well, entering Mastodon in the search bar of a search engine today shows that it’s even easier than it was during the big Twitter exodus. The first link is mastodon.social. Clicking that lands you on a page where Create an account is highlighted in blue. From there, it’s the standard signup process everyone is used to.
Edit: Rewrote the comment to focus on the actual flow today rather than anything speculative.
Transferring also means losing your post history, it all gets stuck on the instance you left behind.
the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don’t know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don’t give a shit
When you try do sign up on the Mastodon app it defaults to and recommends mastodon.social, which does nothing of this sort. The average user will just keep this default and be fine.
im not sure what happened i think i was taking a shit
Since I was a poor little kid in the slums of Nairobi with no internet access I dreamed about having a
<service>account. […]I didn’t even know Mastodon has an exclusive club streak lol.
Just like Lemmy, some Mastodon instances have measures in place to try and prevent bots.
And it’s also a way for topic focused servers to filter out signups as well. There are general purpose instances with open sign ups that don’t do that.
Yeah, I got into Fosstodon right before they went invite only. And then I moved to a Sharkey instance.
Wait people didn’t join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?
That’s actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?
I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn’t feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)
They did, but it’s nothing huge.
Frankly? I’m happy that they didn’t end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.
Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who’d spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That’s regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.
Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying “this is fine, this is how it’s supposed to be”. And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.
Someone might say “but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They’d behave better.” Well… we’re talking about a large horde of users, they’d be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.
A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I’ve been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I’ve been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It’s exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.
