Fediverse

Simplicity.

Can you guys help explain it to someone completely inexperienced?

I had Twitter but only used it for following music venues to see upcoming events and bars for happy hour updates. I have a Mastodon account but only played with it for a few minutes because i didn't really get it. I don't understand following a person. What can one person have to say that i would care enough about to download an app. What am i missing?

People like simple and easy to use.

Bluesky got that, fediverse in general don't have that.

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.

I don't know. But one potential advantage of bsky over mastodon is the data and real account migration capability between instances.

Also bsky is run by a company and overall infra is better than most community instances of mastodon, so people will see better performance and more ad/pr visibility of the platform.

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.

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.

Because they liked Twitter, and Bluesky is (presumably) like Twitter before Elmo bought it.

I wrote an article on this last night.

https://aidanraymond.medium.com/why-bluesky-isnt-the-alternative-to-x-formerly-twitter-you-re-looking-for-and-why-mastodon-is-46c8901f2748

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.

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.

Star power. High production values. Less complex (appears to be more centralized, immediately easy to conceptualize as "twitter but not right wing")

I'm sure a certain percentage of people can't spell mastodon.

I never post, but I do follow a couple of channels on bluesky and mastodon. Bluesky always just works. Mastodon breaks all the freaking time.

Because you install the app, make an account, and use it and now it has more celebs I guess.

Two words: Nomadic identity

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.

Are you asking about "people" or "nerds"? People prefer Bluesky due to its simplicity and momentum. There are more popular outlets using it. If you're assuming that People would prefer the complexity of the Fediverse and instances, if you think People know what a decentralized community run server is, you're a "nerd" (for lack of a better term, I'm sorry).

The battle has always been the same: Windows v. Apple, Android v. iOS, SMS Twitter v. App Twitter. Some people prefer flexibility and investing time in making things work the way they want (Nerds). Some people want an out of the box product that's well designed and efficient (People).

Fifty Seven Third Party Apps is not a selling point - that's called anxiety inducing fragmentation. Some people want to walk down the grocery store aisle and choose between 57 options for toilet paper and some people just want "good", "better", "best". The reality is that most people just want to be told what to do. They have too much shit going on in their lives to care about "decentralization".

Mastodon will never challenge well financed closed or semi-open platforms. As it's designed, it's apparent it never intended to. It will continue to grow at a slow rate as an alternative. Hopefully, the fediverse is realized and you can choose to host your own server and gain access to other social platforms.

The reality is that this stuff costs money. In the near future, you'll have the same three choices with social media as we do with other services: ad-subsidized, subscription, self-hosted. Anything with ads is going to have an algorithm. Anything with a subscription is going to have a board of directors. Selfhosting comes with a steep learning curve.

It's because of the connotation with an overrated metal band of the same name.

/s for the overly serious

Why is anyone usi5any of them? They're all clogged toilets overflowing the same shit onto the flower.

We need a community owned centralized service. I don't think the mastodon model is a good one for social media, it's too complicated.