There are a number of things I don't like about mastodon.
1. The platform is outright hostile to discovery. You generally can't even index posts in a search engine. This is not what I want, at all.
2. Moderation is awful. Letting individual servers control moderation at their whim is not what I want. In contrast, Bluesky's idea of labelling services and opt-in moderation sounds amazing.
3. After point 1, it probably goes without saying that Mastodon is outright hostile to algorithms. While I agree that algorithms can be very problematic, Bluesky's approach to opt-in algorithms is an interesting approach.
4. I think the ship has long sailed on Mastodon. It's failed time and again to gain enough critical mass for non-tech people to adopt. Clearly the combination of above issues, or even maybe the confusion of onboarding, is too much.
Overall I'm glad Mastodon exists, and perhaps Bluesky wouldn't be what it is without first seeing what worked and didn't work with Mastodon.
That's my impression too. There was a flock of academics and relatively non-tech folks joining a few years ago. Most didn't stay, and a few of those who did are now flocking to Bluesky.
But the others seem to be very much at home. They are not millions. They are probably prioritizing the small communities that have formed over maximum reach.
> You generally can't even index posts in a search engine.
That's a per-instance setting in an easy to find place in the Administration section. It's not doing anything more complex than swapping ROBOTS.txt files.
If on per-instance, there are also per-user settings to opt-in. (Again, it mostly just tweaks ROBOTS.txt.)
The off-by-default nature makes it seem "hostile" if your intent is to roll your own Fediverse index, because you actually have to read ROBOTS.txt files and abide by them. On the other hand, it is nice because it sets an ecosystem norm that indexes and bots should respect ROBOTS.txt and are considered bad actors to destroy if they can't be bothered to do the simple thing of respecting a ROBOTS.txt file.
The off-by-default nature makes it a little bit harder to find an instance if you do want your posts indexed in a search engine, but that's a part of why good federation means a diversity of instances.
Also, if they are your posts you want searchable nothing is stopping you from using an API to repost them to any other website you control with search engine indexing. I've seen several bloggers include their microblog posts from ActivityPub on their blog. That's my "eventual" plan for my own ActivityPub posts; I don't want the "live feed" search indexed, but I may want to eventually curate "best of" stuff, add context, do some revisions/editing, and upgrade them to blog posts.
And Nostr. Nostr is smaller than either Bluesky or ActivityPub, but it has some benefits over those two. It has a large number of cool clients (twitter-like, medium-like, music related, instagram-like) and the fact that instance admin can't de-platform you like they can on Mastodon, which literally happened to me.
Nostr also shows signs of being able to support the developers via very easy "tipping" feature. For example when new Amethyst (nostr client on android) is released, it makes it super easy to send the developers couple cents. And those cents add up. I don't think it's self sustainable currently, but it's not that far either.
No, there are no instances, there are just caching servers called "relays" that are run by many different people.
You create the content on your device and then send it to many of these relays (usually 10-20) and other users pull the content from also 10-20 relays. So if one relay decides to block you, then people still get your content from other relays. If all relays decide to block you, then you can (quite easily) run your own relay and tell your friends to pull the data from it. You own your data and you can resend it to wherever you want (it's signed by your private key, so it's verifiably from you).
Because there are no instances. There are relays that you post to, and that people use to fetch notes from. But there are no “user accounts” on the relays. If the note is signed by your private key, it comes from you, regardless of how it came to me. It can be through a bunch of relays.
Relays can and do filter notes by pub key. To fight spam, and problematic content. But you as a user can always change the relay set that you post to. And, of course, host your own relay, which is pretty straightforward.
Yeah, probably. Nostr is quite hated by the Hacker News community from what I have observed. This is most likely because it's used by folks that are into freedom technologies that explicitly don't allow excluding any users from participating. And so it attracts people that are into bitcoin, Tor, cryptography, etc. "Crypto" is actually quite hated at Nostr and you get called out for bringing any stupid crypto coins. You are free to talk about anything though and the system can't block or exclude you, but people may mute you in their clients.
My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is terrible. It’s great that it’s open, but it was far too much work to find people and topics to follow outside of my instance (indieweb.social). BlueSky makes discovery natural and easy.
My experience with Mastodon is that discovery is wonderful. It is natural and easy - no algorithm, no manipulation, nothing at all. Just type in details of person you want to follow and follow them.
Their discovery is so bad that they were touting new discovery algorithms for account recommendations in some recent release. So much for "no algorithm".
Both are written with the idea of decentralization and federation in mind. Bluesky at least superficially looks centralized like Twitter, which is simply put, what I want. I believe that's the case for most ex Twitter users too.
Deceptive. While half the tech people I used to follow on Twitter moved to Mastodon, three quarters of them have either shifted to bsky or post to both via mirroring.
Aside from tech, though: practically none of the non-tech people I followed on Twitter moved to Mastodon. Almost all of them went to Bluesky. I follow a mix of people, so I ended up mostly on Bluesky.
I would have been happy on Mastodon too, and I don't know why it didn't catch on with non-tech people, but it just hasn't. So Bluesky is our main opportunity for an open social web, at this time.
It sounds stupid but I think the bit where you pick your host was too much for normies or led to pushing off the decision and just not joining. Even when you have an account you know have to pick a client.
Hey, question. Is mirroring officially supported by either platform. So for example, can I configure my blue sky account to just monitor my mastodon feed and re-post things for me?
Have the non-tech people you used to follow on Twitter also migrated to Mastodon? What about the other half of the tech people, where did they go?
Labeling another post as deceptive and then trying to use just one demographic (and not a very large one at that) as proof for whether mastodon is "large" in percentage terms is not very reassuring as to the level of discussion on Mastodon tbh.
I am just relaying my experience. Bluesky and Mastodon together cover 90% of the intelligent discussion I used to get on Twitter, weighed more heavily towards Mastodon. To pretend it’s a dead platform is ridiculous.
Sure they are, it's just that it's centralised and you don't see it. If bluesky shut down it's business guess where you data goes? Into the void, correct.
Data isn't tied to an instance in mastodon, it resides in an instance and can be easily migrated. If you either host yourself or subscribe to a reputable service that offers mastodon, like omg.lol then it's a safe bet your data will live long after the other proprietary services get shut down.
User identities are not user data. Your identity is only lost if you used an identity provider that shut down. Your data is separately stored. You can, in effect, own your bluesky identity forever, even if every BS server shuts down, so long as DNS still exists and functions.
1. This is true for did:web but less true for did:plc identities.
2. For did:plc identities to survive a full "bluesky PBC" death, you'd need to to transfer master authority for your PLC identity to a set of keys you control. If you don't then ultimately bluesky PBC would still have final authority over your identity. But if you transfer control to your own keys ahead of time then you can use those keys to make changes long after bluesky PBC's death.
Wound be great if you posted the URL to the relevant documentation for this… I guess there must be some docs about these delicate details? Thank you very much!
It's generally pretty sparse docs because everything is fairly "beta" still and because it is cryptography if you fuck it up you permanently lose control over your account forever. This is one of the reasons they don't advertise non-custodial recovery keys super aggressively.
And the protocol that is used for maintaining a ledger of key changes isn't exactly ideal or to my knowledge final but rather is in a "it's good enough until we douse the other fires" state.
That's not actually true. If you host your data yourself with a PDS then everything continues to work. And your data is all stored in a big merkle tree so you can actually just back it up from the network and if bluesky shits itself you can upload it to your own PDS and continue as if nothing happened.
Same goes for identity (albeit in a different way)
Why do they write as if activitypub and mastodon do not exist?