Technology

Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.

Archive

But yeah, you're 100% right.

Most scientists aren't allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don't have the time.

Being a scientist doesn't mean you have the technical knowledge to run a public facing server.

Mastodon is great.

The only reason why it doesn't get as much traction is because it doesn't manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.

Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.

It's a great concept. There's a reason a lot of people use it.

what are those?

existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub

While there has been some onboarding QOL stuff for mastodon, Bluesky still has them beat on that.

The "People" segment in the explore menu is a nice start, but it's still dependent on the users picking a server that somewhat matches their interests.

But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don't need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn't (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer

Scientists should consult tech people about stuff like this just like we should consult scientists for science stuff. Unfortunately a lot of tech people also aren't conscious of this stuff either.

Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it's time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.

I'm on both and Mastodon is missing (at least in any easy to use way) most of the features that make Bluesky such a good destination:

• instant add subscribe lists
• subscribable block lists
• custom feeds/subscribable algorithms
• keyword/topic blocks
• nuclear block where you never see the blocked person again
• optional discover feed
• DM preferences

All these things (and more I'm sure I'm forgetting), make Bluesky very quick to get started with and very powerful for honing your feeds to be exactly how you want and free of harassment and trolling.

I am still trying with Mastodon, but it's really slow going and I can fully understand why people wouldn't bother. After a year I am way behind where I was in a week with Bluesky.

In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.

i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.

FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.

Yes but it's also a good sign that he left the project some time ago. He's all about NOSTR now.

When you sign up with Bluesky, it gives you the choice to sign up with the big main server or with an auxiliary server. Just like Lemmy does.

The problem is that when Lemmy got hit with a big influx of users, the main server couldn't handle the load, so they quit accepting new users. This confused and upset a lot of people, because now they had to go shopping for another instance to apply to, and many of the bigger ones weren't accepting new users, either, because of the same problem. This was a crucial moment for the adoption of the platform, and the infrastructure just wasn't there to handle it.

EDIT: Shit, I think I'm misremembering that. That's what happened with Mastodon. Although, it could've happened with Lemmy, too. In fact, it's a problem with all of these social networks that aren't run by gigantic corporations. People expect a certain level of service, and you can't provide that unless you have a ton of money.

https://http.cat/status/451

because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.

Bluesky has a lot more normies on it while mastodon is mostly early-adopter types. Mastodon, in my experience, is either very technical people (software engineers and other tech people) or very political people. Bluesky has normal people on it

I checked out threads for a day and I liked it because the algorithm wasn't jamming a bunch of outrage content down my throat but that's the only thing I can say about it. Haven't used it since then (deleted my entire meta account)