Mastodon has been around since 2016 and has 804k MAU.
The platform has 57 third party apps.
The platform is decentralized and has community ran servers.
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It’s the path of least resistance to achieve Musklessness. The second two of the positives you listed are actually negatives to the average Joe. Choice paralysis, overwhelming number of apps and servers, these are things that put people off even trying, especially if there are easier-to-use alternatives that are familiar and instant.
Mastodon is great, but it’s not quite there yet in terms of convenience. Too much copying and pasting and clicking through to different instances in order to read old posts etc. It needs to be more cohesive in a way that doesn’t require constantly leaving your timeline or going into the settings.
It’s also the case that the Twitter diaspora who are famous tend to choose BlueSky, and that brings a lot of people along with them.
And it’s also the case that Mastodon doesn’t have much of a marketing campaign outside of word-of-mouth, whereas BlueSky does.
Because centralized services are easier to use.
This exactly. I didn’t join Lemmy for a long time, because I would search for “Lemmy”, get confused when I see a page asking me to “pick an instance” instead of seeing a front page, and then leave because I thought that they were all independent from each other.
It wasn’t until reddit killed my favorite app that I finally decided to put in the effort to figure it out.
It’s just easier. I have both but I almost never use Mastodon anymore. Federation there doesn’t seem to work right. I didn’t know what an instance was so I joined mastodon.social. Finding and following people in the app doesn’t always seem to work right if they’re on another instance. Doing it in a browser is even more painful.
The people I liked to follow and interact with on X, many tried Mastodon and abandoned it, and many more are now on Bluesky. This creates momentum to “follow the crowd” as it were.
Additionally, you only have one chance to make a first impression. A lot of us tried Mastodon earlier and it wasn’t ready. Bluesky started as invite-only, which drummed up interest before catching this zeitgeist of people leaving X.
Lastly, and maybe it’s just me, but the font sizing on the official Mastodon app on Android is generally too small and can’t be changed. Bluesky allows me to change it and make it more comfortable to use.
You want the bullshit “Mastodon is too complicated and hard to use!” answer or the real answer?
BlueSky has rich people behind it.
They’re the same answer.
You need money to market applications to users. Bluesky is sold the same way that Twitter is, your favorite moron celebrity might hit like or retweet on your stuff.
They aren’t really the same answer.
People suggest that Mastodon is too complicated for the average knuckle-dragging moron to use (and it might be, but frankly I consider that a pro, not a con) because it has “servers”, as if the entire point of the internet wasn’t to have a global network of communication across a multitude of clients and servers. Do these same people think the concept of websites and email are also too complex for the regular person? Maybe… But again, if the regular person is that fucking dumb do we really want have them in our community at all?
What’s more, BlueSky is supposedly federated (or “will be”™), and as such it’ll have to deal with all of the same challenges around federation that Mastodon deals with, and people are kidding themselves if they think otherwise.
Otherwise I agree with your last sentence. Social media is about money and fame, first and foremost. The average person will always go where the most money and fame are concentrated.
The people leaving Twitter right now want Twitter minus Elon. That’s Bluesky. They’ve heard a couple of their Twitter follows mention it and they’ve gone to their app store where they find an app called Bluesky, install it and easily join and start using it. Once they do they are finding it pretty straightforward to find people they used to follow on Twitter.
That’s all people want.
It’s because of the connotation with an overrated metal band of the same name.
/s for the overly serious
What is with all these wall of text answers guys?
Twitter people like Twitter and Twitter man for making it. Twitter now not Twitter is now X and no more Twitter man. Twitter people not like TeslaSpace man. Twitter man make BlueSky.
No elephant needed to make this story work. Remember: twitter brain cannot handle too many characters.
57 different 3rd party apps is probably a good start. Mastodon has to be easy to on-board and it isn’t for someone with no technical understanding what domains, servers or instances are. To that group Bluesky makes sense. You are signing up for Bluesky. Try to onboard that group to mastodon and they don’t understand if they are on mastodon.social or mastodon.world or any other instance.
Why would they be on one of those fringe services with less users than bluesky? That’s what a non expert understands
All those federated platform will only become popular if the backend is dumb and the frontend is smart, i.e. you create your account on a frontend but can use the same credentials to connect via another frontend and no matter which frontend you connect to, all content for the platform is accessible to you, there’s no admin having control over your experience, only people offering different UI experiences. Federation/defederation/deciding to host NSFW content, that’s all taken care of behind the scene just like on Reddit, for the user they’re just using Lemmy via frontend X or Y and they decide what communities and users they want to block.
Bluesky s federated and mit licensed
This practically means nothing tbh. Social networks when they gain economies of scale due to the network effect will effectively shed all the pretense of open source and open platform etc.
We’ve seen it with Facebook, Google, etc, during the 2010’s with closing of chat standards and destruction of XMPP. Reddit 3rd Party API access is another example of this. We’ll see it again.
Average users do not even remotely care about federated software and/or decentralisation. That is techno-babble to them and their eyes will glaze over if you try to market that to them.
That being said: Mastodon does a shit job at explaining how it works, how to use it, and what it’s advantages are. The Joinmastodon landing page just assumes you already know how a fair bit about instances work and what federated software is and does a very poor job explaining it. And even then, most users won’t care either way. They just want to click a Join button and be done.
That’s exactly what drove me into seeking out Lemmy instead. I hopped on Mastodon and it made me feel like I was being coralled into following some niche hobby forum exclusively, and I wasn’t into that. It didn’t explain that the instance itself was largely irrelevant and that the rest of the platform would open up to me after choosing one.
Lemmy still had a learning curve, but having experience with reddit I was able to pick it up easily enough.
Because people will choose convenience over their vey own survival. Also, in this case, they apparently don’t see a problem with leaving Twitter because it’s MAGA to join BS which is backed by MAGA money. Convenience über alles. Ethics be damned. I’m fine with people like that not joining the fediverse.
I have a friend who has had a mastodon instance since it was gnu social, and there are two reasons I stopped using it.
First, the UI sucks. He installed 3 or 4 different skins and they were all barely usable. I don’t want or need something flashy, xfce is my favorite windows manager, but it needs to at least work and not be confusing.
Second, the people suck. It went from being okay to by the time I left I don’t think I was seeing any exchanges that didn’t have antisemitism or racism.
Mastodon is a pain in the ass to get signed up for anyone under room temperature IQ, so, like, most of Twitter’s users, even the ones smart enough to leave.
Sign up process is easier. No existential decisions to be made to get started.
Because no one made a droolproof guide to migrating to Mastodon and Bluesky put money into it.
For people who can’t remember their password, it’s preferable.
