[smcn]

I think that the clear preference people have for Bluesky over the Fediverse shows that maybe it's as decentralised as people as willing to accept.

Fedi is an amazing piece of software but so too people were/are bouncing off of it. I'm not one that shared the same frustration but it was very clearly a problem for many people.

Bluesky doesn't have that issue and has been easy for people to migrate to. At the end of the day, we can't let good be the enemy of perfect.

[ocdtrekkie]

Bluesky has been popular for like a month. I think it would be very weird to evaluate "clear preference" for Bluesky vs. Mastodon based on the fact one is kinda trendy to post about today.

In a lot of ways Mastodon has reached normal daily productivity while Bluesky is on the peak of inflated expectations. A lot of problems Mastodon has or has dealt with are problems Bluesky hasn't meaningfully had to deal with yet.

[smcn]

My justification for stating that is that we're seeing people come back to Bluesky whereas people would try to create an account on a Mastodon service, their first post would be confusion and terror, and they'd leave after a few days of trying.

There are daily users of Mastodon (myself being one), it's just that the range of people is much smaller than Bluesky and Twitter due to the comparatively higher barrier of entry.

[jaredcwhite]

I don't know who these "people" are you are referring to, and these days the barrier to entry is quite low. I've helped people join a Mastodon instance and set up their profile and follow a few people in a matter of minutes. Whether they have any interest in continuing after that point is entirely up to them and their particular interests.

We haven't even begun to see the total possible size of ActivityPub-based social networking. The social web is in its infancy. Let's revisit this conversation in 10-20 years.

[smcn]

> I've helped people join a Mastodon instance and set up their profile and follow a few people in a matter of minutes.

That you had to do this is the issue that I'm talking about.

[jaredcwhite]

And here I thought the point of "social" media is to be, y'know, social and all.

[smcn]

Absolutely is but if onboarding requires help from a human then there is work to be done.

[ocdtrekkie]

I mean I registered in 2018 and then apart from some initial experimentation mostly abandoned Mastodon until like 2021. There are people "coming back" to Mastodon all the time, and I’m sure plenty of people (myself included) signed up on Bluesky, went "meh", and then uninstalled the app because their phone didn't have enough free space for OS updates.

Anecdotes are sort of interesting but not necessarily representative. Numbers are also garbage, mostly because bots are a lot of the numbers.

Things need time, and as Bryan pointed out, the goals are pretty different. Maybe both are destined to win in their specific niches of global vs. nonglobal interaction. Maybe Bluesky kills Twitter (which is mostly global chat) and Mastodon kills Facebook (which is mostly friends chat).

[JohnTHaller]

Having to 'pick a server' is a huge barrier for regular folks joining Mastodon. You don't need that for Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, etc. If there were a huge well-funded and well-run default that people could optionally pick something different from, that would be another story.

[smcn]

Truth social being an example of a Mastodon server that doesn’t market itself as being .

Doesn’t federate either, and they’ve violated the license, but core concept is there to be copied.

[raxxorraxor]

Bluesky has telephone verification. That is often an disqualifier and common for tech affine people. Not that many other networks did not make the same mistake.

I am not sure if Bluesky can have long term success to be honest.

[diggan]

> Bluesky has telephone verification.

Where did you see this? I've used the platform for 1.5 years or something, + created a new bot account just yesterday, and haven't been asked for a phone number for either accounts.

[Cytobit]

I made a Bluesky account without a phone number. Not sure what you're talking about.

[pfraze]

Telephone verification doesn’t tend to be a major factor in whether software products are successful.