Technology

Mastodon isn't a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.

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.

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

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.

Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word "cis" and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.

Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm "to suggest the users whatever they interested in", less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.

While I agree with you. I don't think Mastodon is user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.

user-unfriendliness.

I can't really disagree with this, since I've personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I've got this reflexive skepticism since I'm an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can't speak to earlier times.) I think I'm probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.

I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can't *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?

As a brazilian, I'm now deeply offended that the ISO does not recognize brazilion as a valid amount

Bluesky is built on an open source ActivityPub alternative called "AT Protocol". However, Bluesky itself is not open source* and afaik does not yet federate with any other software. The company is a "public benefit corporation".

From my understanding, Bluesky has good moderation, to the point where Jack Dorsey (the Twitter founder) condemned it and withdrew from the project. That's a big plus in my book.

• Another commenter pointed out that some parts of it are open source, such as the apps and at least some parts of the backend. Im not sure to what extent the backend is open source.

One is going down the drain first