Look, people choosing bluesky, likely knowing full well that it will eventually go bad and they’ll need to relocate again… we can scold people like that for choosing a precarious VC backed service, or maybe we can recognize that in the social media space that some people are … migrants.
Maybe we should ask ourselves what Bluesky offers now, in the near term, that’s compelling to people who might not enjoy the luxury of a long term, and ask what their choices say about us in the process.
@mhoye One thing to remember is that although the mass twitter -> bluesky migration is *starting*, we're still in the range where a *lot* of the people joining bluesky at this moment are people who are willing to experiment. Meaning: Most of them are people who *already tried* Mastodon, since of course it's been around longer, and rejected it, and could probably clearly explain what reason they rejected it if asked.
@mcc @mhoye my hunch for “rejecting it”? Its antiviral nature.
After almost 2 decades on social media, people have been trained to look for and chase after visible metrics (likes, followers, boosts) and feel lost without them. Ditto for algorithms picking content for them.
The Fediverse is all about fostering genuine connection but the behavior modification empires of Big Tech made people forget about this / discard it in favor of online popularity games
@oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye When you're invested in something (as people in this thread are invested in Mastodon) and people don't like it, it's tempting to believe that they don't like it because of some fault of theirs, they're stupid, or ignorant, or lazy, etc. However, this is generally self-deception, so when I find myself thinking this way, I generally try to suppress that urge and look for other reasons.
I use both networks currently. Though generally I prefer Mastodon for myself, I see plenty of valid reasons why one would prefer Bluesky. I won't try to list them, as I see that most of the ones I have in mind have already been mentioned elsewhere in response to the OP. I would encourage folks to actually listen to those rather than formulating more comforting hypothetical explanations.
@oblomov @_elena @mcc @mhoye To address just one point, though, people on Mastodon often repeat the fiction that we "don't have an algorithm." Of course, Mastodon has feeds which are populated by software, so by definition it has an algorithm. But my purpose in saying that isn't to nitpick semantics. I say it because admitting this then forces one to describe the situation differently: Mastodon only supports a fixed set of limited, very simplistic algorithms.
The direct implication of this is that many users will have use cases for which these don't work well (because they're fixed and simplistic), and in those cases the posts won't get from their authors to the people who want to see them. And then those users will go elsewhere, like Bluesky, which has algorithmic choice (an unlimited selection of first party and 3rd party feeds).
It's a pretty simple reality, but one that largely gets ignored on Mastodon and obscured by the comforting and self-congratulatory fiction that "we don't have an algorithm."
Personally, I feel that on Mastodon I would benefit from feeds like some of those that exist on Bluesky, but I like other things about Mastodon, so I keep using it despite this shortcoming.
