I’s heard news that BlueSky has been growing a lot as Xitter becomes worse and worse, but why do people seem to prefer BlueSky? This confuses me because BlueSky does not have any federalization technologies built into it, meaning it’s just another centralized platform, and thus vulnerable to the same things that make modern social media so horrible.
And so, in the hopes of having a better understanding, I’ve come here to ask what problems Mastodon has that keep people from migrating to it and what is BlueSky doing so right that it attracts so many people.
This question is directed to those who have used all three platforms, although others are free to put out their own thoughts.
(To be clear, I’ve never used Xitter, BlueSky or Mastodon. I’m asking specifically so that I don’t have to make an account on each to find out by myself.)
Edit:
Edit2: (changed the wording a bit on the last part of point 1 to make my point clearer.)
From reading the comments, here are what seems to be the main reasons:
- Federation is hard
The concept of federation seems to be harder to grasp than tech people expected. As one user pointed out, tech literacy is much less prevalent than tech folk might expect.
On Mastodon, you must pick an instance, for some weird “federation” tech reason, whatever that means; and thanks to that “federation” there are some post you cannot see (due to defederalization). To someone who barely understands what a server is, the complex network of federalization is to much to bare.
BlueSky, on the other hand, is simple: just go to this website, creating an account and Ta Da! Done! No need to understand anything else.
The federalized nature of Mastodon seems to be its biggest flaw.
The unfamiliar and more complex nature of Mastodon’s federalization technology seems to be its biggest obstacle towards achieving mass adoption.
- No Algorithm
Mastodon has no algorithm to surface relevant posts, it is just a chronological timeline. Although some prefer this, others don’t and would rather have an algorithm serving them good quality post instead of spending 10h+ curating a subscription feed.
- UI and UX
People say that Mastodon (and Lemmy) have HORRIBLE UX, which will surely drive many away from Mastodon. Also, some pointed out that BlueSky’s overall design more closely follows that of Twitter, so BlueSky quite literally looks more like pre-Musk Xitter.
Just because BlueSky isn’t federated doesn’t mean it’s (totally) centralized. It uses the AT protocol which means user data lives in a separate place than the app itself. While the BlueSky app is centralized all the user data (your posts, likes, etc) live in a separate place and can be self-hosted. This means that if BlueSky went bust or something, users could easily just move to a new platform that someone would inevitably create and all of their data, likes, follows would all be there.
is that migration documented?
Sort of. There isn’t another platform to migrate to at the moment. But this link explains how to self-host your data (PDS) https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
And in general, because of the way the protocol works, you could easily build a new app and just use the data that Bluesky wrote. So another platform wouldn’t even need users to “migrate”, since it’s “being your own data”
Why aren’t there 2nd party apps then if I can easily build a new app? I’d much prefer to use one that doesn’t poll as often.
Maybe you can be the one to build it!
My guess is that nothing yet exists because A) the official app is generally pretty good and B) Bluesky is pretty newly popular so the demand wasn’t there yet
why bother replying if you don’t know?