Comment by melvinroest
12 hours ago
Seems like a fun growth hacking way to grow Bluesky as well. I made an account just to test it out, haha
12 hours ago
Seems like a fun growth hacking way to grow Bluesky as well. I made an account just to test it out, haha
There is no question that for-profit social network projects will end up as Twitter did. The only question is when.
Ideally, the comment system should be either self-hosted or more fediverse-like. The rest is a temporary compromise that will sink in the sands of time.
I disagree. I think ATProtocol found a pretty good balance for de/centralization. Yes most people are on Bluesky PDSs but the data is easy to backup and move and Mastodon does not improve on that afaik.
Mastodon had their shot and people found it too confusing.
I know I shouldn't react this way, but this view that Mastodon can only be successful if it's the largest platform out there always gets under my skin. There are about a million active users of the fediverse, and I know plenty of us find it nice right now.
Active users are measured in different ways by different platforms, so if we compare registered users, fedi has 12.5M compared to 42M for Bluesky. So it's approximately 25% of the size.
It's not the best place to go if you want to get a large following, and it's not Serious Business, but as a user that's not what I want from a social platform. I have plenty of people to follow who are talking about things that interest me.
You're welcome to come have a look if you want, but otherwise no worries. We're doing fine. Maybe you'll check it out sometime when some drama happens at Bluesky. The fediverse is not going away any time soon.
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They're not the biggest, but big enough to have a lot of active accounts, so I think they're likely to persist and get more than one shot on goal. (Similarly for Bluesky.)
My biggest turnoff has been the fact that you don't own your own data/account and are beholden to whichever dictator(s) run the instance you started out on. You can migrate, but that entire process is just convoluted. I should be able to create an account with my own keys and use them anywhere. Servers can choose to use and share allowlists or blocklists. Each instance being its own little world kills discovery and adds a ton of friction.
And instances seem to be pretty heavy on resources. Reminds me of why Matrix never really took off, running a Matrix server is just too difficult and time-consuming for what you get out of it.
I know proponents of Mastodon will point out that you can work around these warts, but I don't want to. I don't think the model is suited for me.
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Not sure why above is downvoted. You’re right. Google Trends reveals how much of a flash in the pan Mastodon was post-Twitter: https://imgur.com/a/i2Vq9FR
Social media needs to be very simple for the masses to adopt. The elevator pitch needs to be one sentence and must not include the word “server”.
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It’s hard for something to succeed when the selling point is “we aren’t that other thing!”
Edit to remove unintended flame bait.
True, but Bluesky really does solve pains that closed platforms can’t/won’t. Having a choice over your algorithm is like getting lead out of your pipes, or getting a bidet or something.
I am a bidet convert, they are fantastic.
I never used twitter and I don't use bsky, so I'm not sure how different they are. I just don't think that should be the goal.