[ncallaway]

From using Bluesky it feels like the goal is to build a social media experience that’s as decentralized as possible without sacrificing the user experience.

So, they want the experience to be like Twitter for the users that don’t care about decentralization, but to be backed by something like ATProto underneath for those who care.

I’d say Mastodon is more “the entire point is that it’s decentralized”. Bluesky it’s a major point, but not the entire point.

[ethbr1]

When you're competing against goliath first-moved closed platforms, pragmatic eventual-decentralization makes sense.

What use is first delivering today's table stakes features 5 years from now, albeit fully decentralized and open?

[ncallaway]

Yea, especially when their rational is DMs are the most asked for feature.

Build a good enough version now, and then tackle the end to end encrypted fully decentralized version. The cheap version can give them the breathing room to build the better version.

[wmf]

Twitter is over ten years old so arguably all its competitors are "late". Bluesky doesn't have 5 years of runway though.

[ramesh31]

>Bluesky it’s a major point, but not the entire point.

And I'd say that was the right tradeoff to make. Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work. And no, I'm not going to spend hours digging through docs.

[krapp]

>Mastodon is only marginally more useful than IRC at this point, and is completely useless to the average person. I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work.

I don't know how you define "average person" but plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon.

This argument that Mastodon is "too complicated" is perennial, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary in the growth of its adoption. It's particularly weird to keep seeing it on a forum full of people who think compiling software from source and working in arcane terminals is trivial.

You can just sign up for an instance like any other website (or multiple.) Or you can pay any number of hosts for an instance of your own (I use masto.host, $9.00/mo.) Or just run the activitypub plugin in Wordpress and your Wordpress is now also a Mastodon node.

If I can do it, it ain't that hard.

[Kye]

It's been on a steady downward slide for the last year, from almost 2m during The Exodus to about 900k active users now. People sign up, but most don't stick around. I also can't help but notice my own timeline has slowed to a crawl, and it's mostly the same few people. It's not vibrant and busy like it used to be.

[krapp]

Aggressive growth and addictive velocity are cancerous, let it reach a healthy equilibrium. Slow can be good, too.

I'm following ~500 people at the moment, and getting relays from a few instances. I see a constant flow of new stuff but I can also easily leave and do other things, because Mastodon isn't designed to maximize engagement and addiction. I don't feel a constant need to post or comment or chase endorphins. The scale is just fine for me.

[Kye]

I was on there when it was just Mastodon.social. It was more vibrant then, and it's been more vibrant in recent memory, before it rocketed to 2m users and started falling. Something is different, and it's not good. I think people who've been there are getting fed up with problems no one seems to care about years on (even people like me who kept giving it chances and pushing for change), and new people are going somewhere else instead of trying Mastodon.

You can stick your head in the sand if you want and hope the year-long freefall stops rather than consider there might be a problem. It's what I've come to expect.

[krapp]

I'm not sticking my head in the sand, I'm just not having the experience you seem to have had, and neither is anyone I actually hang around with.

If you prefer Bluesky, that's fine. Competition is good.

[Nextgrid]

> plenty of people who aren't developers are on Mastodon

How many of them are gonna stick around once their instance goes offline, or the admin does something crazy (which isn't impossible considering how many of these are ran as personal/fun projects by geeks rather than actual businesses), or their instance gets into a feud with the others and results in defederation?

All of this is overhead. It's overhead that can be managed, or you can pay someone to manage it for you, but it's still overhead and extra problems that just don't exist when you can instead sign up for Instagram or Twitter and call it a day.

[krapp]

My person in deity the standard you're defending is the lunatic dumpster fire that is Twitter, where Elon just decides shit at random like "likes are private now" and "you can just pay for a checkmark" or "I'm unbanning all the nazis lol."

I personally haven't experienced any of the "overhead" of Mastodon that you're mentioning, and making seem far more common than it is, but Mastodon seems far more stable than Twitter as a platform and a community at the moment.

And sure, some people might not like it, and that's fine. There are and will always be alternatives. But anything is better than Twitter.

[Barrin92]

>I as a developer have yet to even figure out how it's supposed to work

You go to https://joinmastodon.org/, click on "join" (or pick another server if you are adventurous), fill in your username and email and you're good to go.

Why do people invent fictional horror stories about a service that's at this point functionally as easy to use as any bog standard website?

[anigbrowl]

You go to https://joinmastodon.org/, click on "join" (or pick another server if you are adventurous)

Regular consumers hate this because they don't know what they're getting into, and it feels like the social media equivalent of a crypto scam where you're invited to buy a coin, any coin. It was probably intended to resemble arriving at college during rush week and pick a social/activity club to join, except you have to pick a server without any real way to browse around and understand what differentiates them.

[monknomo]

heck, I'm not a regular user, and I find it annoying to pick a server without knowing what the vibe is. I want to lurk without any transaction costs before I sign up for something

[adparadox]

You can see posts on any server to "find out what the vibe is" without registering. For example: https://fosstodon.org/public/local. What are the transactional costs here?

[ramesh31]

>You go to https://joinmastodon.org/, click on "join" (or pick another server if you are adventurous), fill in your username and email and you're good to go.

And that gives me access to the entire service? Or just bits and pieces of it? And how do I find other services? Asking around? Who's seeing my data if I sign up on another server? What are the anonymous operators of said server doing with my password and email? How do I message someone from another server? Are those messages secure at all?

Decentralized works for motivated parties. It does not work for the masses.

[Barrin92]

Yes, it gives you access to the entire service, you don't need to find anything. Messages and accounts in Mastodon are visible across the network. The operators of almost all instances aren't anonmyous, the address of the default server operators is literally listed on the about page.

If you have zero knowledge and don't care Mastodon functions exactly like Twitter. If you care more, you can invest time, host your own server, do what you want, that's optional.

If decentralized systems don't work it's amazing that my grandfather is able to send emails every day. Which is btw the exact equivalent to Mastodon. You don't care you sign up for Gmail, if you do, run a server out of your basement.

[lxgr]

> If you have zero knowledge and don't care Mastodon functions exactly like Twitter.

That’s simply not true. Even as a technical user I sometimes stumble over things like not being able to follow an account after being linked to their servers web site. “Wait, why am I logged ou– oh, this isn’t my server.”

[tedunangst]

And you know the answer to all those questions for bluesky?

[anigbrowl]

Those questions aren't there, when you sign up it's just like any other service. If you want to do the decentralized thing or wonder 'why do some people have specific domain handles and the like, the information is easy to get, but you could also use it without ever knowing any of that. So very low friction for non-technical users.

[ramesh31]

> And you know the answer to all those questions for bluesky?

Nope. Just pointing out the downfalls of decentralized, and the fact that compromising with some centralization (as Bluesky is doing) is a better way for most people.

[fragmede]

the masses don't ask questions at that granularity though, it either works or it doesn't.

[TaylorAlexander]

I mean you can just sign up and use it. No need to read docs. I have plenty of complaints, but it’s largely alright imo.