[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).