This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
Bluesky is very barebones and has even less functionality than Mastodon. Beside having a similar look to Twitter I don't understand why people choose it.
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain, I had to try 3/4 time before I felt like I had enough info to make the correct choice, and then finding other users from my previous twitter gang was a pain, the barrier to entry is much higher than some other options.
Same as me, I have tried to join mastodon like 4 times since it launched. To me it's still a ghost town with very little of value.
I've built a place I find comfortable, took a couple tries. But I have found decent content, found some of my friends from twitter, found replication bots for people I used to follow but not really interact with.
It's not twitter, but it took me 5+ years to build out my twitter. I think over time, enough people will join defederated social media that it can be a pretty good experience if a little too much work for many. But it will take a little time.
Unfortunately marketing matters a lot. One single brand is easier to understand than the many federated servers of mastodon.
I wanted to check out where this reddit community migrated to some server with something lemmy. It said something about mastadon so I made an account to try to participate. It wasn't really clear to me lemmy isn't another mastodon instance, but a different protocol with some federated synergy. My fault, but the marketing is a bit confusing.
Really? I just spun up a gotosocial instance on a VPS and was up and running in a dozen minutes. Failing that, I'd have just joined mastodon.social. Why was it a hard decision for you? As a tech person, what about "federated" was confusing? I have a second account on a spoken language-specific server, for kicks; I set both of these up within an hour of each other. I donft understand how it could be considered a hard choice.
Now, the finding people, I could understand, but since I was not on Twitter to begin with, I had nobody I cared about following. I can understand how that would be challenging, although it has nothing to do with your home server selection.
Why was it a hard decision for you?
Not the person you replied to, but when a few friends of mine tried to migrate off Twitter, mastodon.social had closed sign-ups. So with the "official" instance unavailable, the issue was that there was a choice at all.
While there's only one "Twitter" or (presently) only one "BlueSky" to join, on Mastodon you suddenly have to decide which instance is the right one to make your account on. Which instance is most likely to stick around for the next couple years? Which instance is most aligned with your interests? Does the instance happen to (de)federate in any way that is a deal-breaker for you? Is the instance moderated well? You wouldn't have to think about those if you signed up to BlueSky.
It's an issue similar to what Linux has with distributions.
There were tools that people made that would find if the people you followed/followed you were on Mastodon and added them so the migration wasn't quite as painful as some here have described.
That's true.
Step 1. Make people feel "excited" about joining by creating false exclusivity. (Facebook was originally only for college campuses)
Step 2. Drop the false exclusivity.
Step 3. Profit?
I honestly don't know either...
i'll chose it because reddit is a cesspit and the fediverse has very little content.
And is there loads of content on BlueSky? It’s really the only thing missing on Mastodon/Lemmy. Both are superior to X/Reddit, but content is slow in moving over.
For my particular niche (illustration) it has a way better concentration of active (and also importantly) high quality actual working professional artists on it than mastodon.
The art scene on mastodon is pretty meh and the largest art centric instance is run by unstable authoritarians that are some of the biggest sources of drama on mastodon.
Going from one billionaire's platform to another (Twitter/Musk > Bluesky/Dorsey) is not a smart move. There's a vast segment of the population that learns nothing and keeps making the same mistakes.
Dorsey doesn't own bluesky, it's a public interest company and it runs on the AT protocol, which is defederated and open source... like lemmy or mastodon
Jack doesn't own bluesky but he is on the board [0] and even working for a public benefit company, is supposed to [1]:
... operate the business with the same authority and behavior as in a traditional corporation
It does go on to state they're required to consider the impact of their decisions not only for shareholders but also employees, customers, community, etc, but there's no mechanism that forces them to do "the right thing". A public benefit company is basically a way to protect decisions made if they were to not align with the concept of "shareholder primacy" [2]. On the other hand, if Bluesky had registered as a certified B Corp [3], that would have more weight to it as they not only have to state their intentions but also provide evidence.
In regards to being federated - are they actually federating with anyone yet? Genuine question, I haven't kept up.
In regards to being open source, it's a good start, but like the Chromium project, the company's needs will drive it forward and the interest of the company will come first, good or bad.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky_(social_network)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)
There's a vast majority of the population that doesn't care.
Not really interested myself: Never liked the Twitter-esque platforms to begin with, plus I'm pretty happy with Lemmy and Kbin.
Twitter is terrible for people like me. I like following interests: books, coding, landscape photography, linux, etc. Twitter is more about following people, and people have diverse interests. One thing I really liked about Reddit was that it had active subreddits dedicated to particular interests. You could just hang out in those subreddits and only ever interact with things on topic to said interests. Lemmy has a bit less of that, unless your interests are politics, linux, and programming, and shitty memes.
Lemmy is great in the same ways (and better in some) in principle, it's just a scale thing that makes it more difficult to obtain that "build your own experience" effect like Reddit has. There just aren't enough people right now to support the super idiosyncratic stream of content that you can curate with Reddit.
My advice is to just lean into it. Start with Ubuntu or Mint, queue up The Next Generation season 1 on your Jellyfin server, and keep contributing.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to Lemmy having more niche places: That was, hands down, my favorite thing about reddit. I don't really care much about following people, I prefer to follow subjects..
Speaking of niche communities, I'd like to take this opportunity to plug !micromobility@lemmy.world
Agreed
I just don't think I know how I'm supposed to "properly" use Mastodon. I just see 80% US political discussion, which is fine, but my broken zoomer brain just gets worn down by it very easily.
With Lemmy/KBin if I get bored with a topic, I can just switch over to a different community/magazine.
Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.
Eventually I realized that the whole concept of "microblogging" is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)
They could have opened themselves when twitter went downhill. They missed this opportunity window Threads took advantage of.
Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.
OTOH, having said that, I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you're not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.
I just realized
BS = Bull... ehrm BlueSky
Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.
Blue Shit
I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.
Lots of reasons:
A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.
For everyone wondering why anyone would use Bluesky when Mastodon and/or the Fediverse is around.
I have to ask why not use both? All the tech people I followed on Twitter went to Mastodon almost immediately when Musk bought the site, while most of my personal friends on Twitter were not willing to leave because they thought Mastodon was too techy and Bluesky couldn't replicate the network of people they valued from Twitter. That said, slowly over time as the invites came rolling in for Bluesky, my personal friend circle has been willing to move to Bluesky while they still wont touch Mastodon and honestly it hasn't harmed me in the least to use both. It's actually sorta nice to have the tech stuff in a separate bucket from my personal connections.
I'm not super hopeful that the AT protocol ever expands beyond the single site it is now, but I will be fully happy to launch my own instance and keep my personal contacts if that day ever comes, and if it doesn't, I've still got Mastodon to fall back to where I'm pretty happily established but for the lack of the people I know IRL.
I'm still hoping that ATProto will one day federate natively with ActivityPub. It's very possible, and there are already relays doing it.
@DarthYoshiBoy @dez It shouldn't matter: thankfully both ActivityPub and AT protocol have open source implementations, so we can have ways for it to work together.
I think we have had so many years of app == platform == protocol that we've forgotten what interoperability really means and looks like. Even the distinction between Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin et al. feels like a holdover from those times.
Bluesky wasn't as confusing as Mastodon
I'm so tired of this bullshit. I went to the mastodon.social; clicked the big button labeled "create an account"; read and accepted the rules; filled out a form asking for my email address, a username and password; confirmed my email; and could immediately post.
How the fuck is that confusing, that's standard fucking practice. Jesus fucked on a pike.
Maybe ask the people what they find confusing about Mastodon, and listen.
I'll give you example. Say I want to sign up , but mastodon.social has currently closed sign-ups. People tell me I can just sign up on any instance, but there's dozens of them and they all appear to be the same. As someone who's not familiar with federated services, I don't know what to base my instance decision on.
How would you help me overcome this choice paralysis?
Additionally, there's the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone's blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.
It's trivial to do but it is an extra step, and for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.
Most people are pointed to joinmastodon.org first and have to pick an instance. And since they're not familiar with decentralization, they don't understand what that means. It's especially weird that they can't directly join mastodon on the site called "joinmastodon" but have to go to another site.
Then once you get past that to make an account, you have to find people and discovery has always been one of the worst aspects of the fediverse. And the graph of instance blocks means a new user may not even be able to find the people they care about and they won't know why.
If you know all this, its easy to understand. But for people used to a centralized system and unaware of all the intricacies of the network, there's a lot of snags here.
Your point about Joinmastodon is too true. It's a terrible starting point for someone who just wants to test the waters: "I have to learn about an entirely new type of digital networking AND commit to an instance? I bet Bluesky doesn't have all these layers of obfuscation."
It would be easier if the community would just agree that there is a default instance with open enrollment—preferably the biggest and mosy popular, or at least one that's maintained by a group with staying power—and just send all the newbies there. If they want to dig deeper, nothing's stopping them, but that way their first impression isn't analysis paralysis.
To your other points:
for discovery, there are the usual methods: trending, hashtags, the search, and people sharing their usernames elsewhere.
I assume that people who are making the hard decision to leave the site where they know all the people they want to follow already are, are also prepared to accept some amount of loss to that pool. It happens all the same whether it's Threads or Mastodon
Yep exactly this. I'm pretty tech oriented and even I was confused about the concept of instances at first.
Federation of a service is confusing because it is a difficult problem to conceptualize. There's no way to easily explain how to use federated services to non techies.
For me? That's fine. I can use federated stuff.
For my mom? Nope. But she needs to get off the internet in general so that's probably a bad example.
It's true. And people try to jump on to similar things. "It's just like how email works!", or "It's just like how international phone calls work!"
Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.
I think I'll stick with Lemmy, Kbin, and a bit of reddit, never cared for the Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky style of website
Reddit is so shitty to use. My desktop doesn't let.me get to because it says they don't allow VPN. Which I don't have on. I think there's an option to make an account to get access...
And the website on mobile is so slow and unintuitive.
Every search I used to make was with site:reddit.com but I just stopped because I can't make it in the site.
I didn't expect it to get that bad.
Why is everything called blue sky all of a sudden? I see blue sky everywhere - blue sky plumbing, blue sky builders, blue sky bar, blue sky physical therapy, blue sky cbd… even Mt Evans was renamed to Mt Blue Sky.
Are you sure it's not just Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? Once you're primed to notice a particular thing you'll notice it more often, even if it was around equally much beforehand.
Software devs for a long time would discuss "green field" development, which is a metaphor from constructing a building in an empty field: you start from nothing, and build all new. Most software devs prefer to write new code rather than try to learn the quirks and nuances of a large, already-existing pile of code, so "green field" is considered both desirable and often practically unattainable.
"Blue sky" is a similar concept but loftier. It isn't just that you have an empty field waiting for you, you've got the infitie expanse of the clear blue sky: endless possibilities, unlimited creativity, etc. "Blue sky development" as a metaphor I think comes from designers, product managers, and other software-dev adjacent fields. It means thinking of ideas that are out of the box and unconstrained by historical limits.
That's why everything is named that: execs and marketers love that kind of hollow promise. That anything is possible even though actually they're almost always just clones of existing things whose greatest innovation is to loudly proclaim how new and innovative you are.