This is incidentally why Mastodon seems to be less bad now. That group of people went there first, but then Mastodon's user growth stalled by some strange coincidence. Then they didn't want to be on the one that was apparently in decline so more of them switched to Bluesky.

Which is kind of sad because from a technical perspective Bluesky seems to have some advantages (provided they fully extricate any dependencies on the corporate entity soon, which is supposedly the plan, but we've seen this play before and know one of the ways it can end).

Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later.

>Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration. Which is almost like the opposite problem: Instead of being centralized right now but they might fix it later, it's federated right now but they might break it later.

This, among other issues with Mastodon, is what made me try Bluesky. Unfortunately, like I said in another comment, the feed crap is breaking me. Even my facebook feed is better than this, and I spent more time pruning Bluesky's.

Mastodon's lack of growth or even perpetually declining MAU is not a coincidence. The community is obsessively anti-growth.

It's politically intolerant in the sense that the vibe is left to hard-left, and even within that sphere there's lot of infighting. Sure, you can use Mastodon as a normie centrist, but the culture is unappealing to many.

Any attempt to plug Mastodon into other decentralized media (Threads, Bluesky) is met with extreme hostility.

Any attempt to make Mastodon more discoverable and searchable is met with hostility. A vocal part of the community is obsessed with safety culture and consent.

Institutes, celebrities, influencers can't use Mastodon because there's no reach and users act like stung by a wasp when anything remotely commercial happens.

Anybody within Mastodon that tries to improve or grow things is shot down and crushed.

The guy that created Mastodon has sacrificed a decade of his life into this thing, for a compensation bordering poverty. He's under constant attack and framed as evil just because he didn't implement some random feature.

There's now a guy creating an Instagram clone called Pixelfed. He's white and talks hip hop slang. Which is close to inevitable for young men as it's deeply integrated into music, gaming, etc. He now stands accused of "cultural appropriation". As he did not immediately fall down to his knees to apologize, he's now framed as a racist.

There was a gay man running a large LGBT instance. Activists were flooding it with spoilers of that Harry Potter game. He tried to stop it and got angry at this behavior, after which he was bullied into a total breakdown, and shut down the instance.

There was a man running a large instance with supreme infra skills. The instance was ballooning. The instance was instant-fast and scaled beautifully. It was popular for being very middle of the road, a generic instance with decent moderation. It was the only instance at the time having a proper search experience. The activist community kept hammering on him for even enabling search and for his moderation not being strict enough, until he ultimately just gave up.

Mastodon doesn't grow because the vocal minority that runs it are chronically online purists that take sadistic joy in destroying anything that would grow it.

I mean, even Mozilla quit their experiment after 3 months. It's shockingly bad.

I've come to a similar conclusion about Mastodon.

> Whereas Mastodon/ActivityPub has some flaws that are going to cause real long-term problems if they're not addressed, e.g. tying accounts to a specific instance combined with the propensity for instances to ban other entire instances or ban small/new instances by default, which will have the unfortunate propensity for market concentration.

I don't think these are problems. Compare it to how email works nowadays, and it's very similar. At least you can easily move your Mastodon account to a new instance and there are built in mechanisms so that you're followers dont even notice your instance has changed, they still keep following you. And good luck running your own email server, you'll also get marked as spam by most. But still, email works and works well. So, no reason for Mastodon not to work.

> Compare it to how email works nowadays, and it's very similar.

> And good luck running your own email server, you'll also get marked as spam by most.

That's exactly the problem. You don't want that to happen.

It's worth mentioning - for those who don't know Voat - that it was a wasteland of Racism, Antisemitism, and Genuine Honest To God, Stated Plainly, Can't Miss It Naziism.

I was interested in it back when it was called Whoaverse because reddit sucks (obviously) but it devolved fast and hard.

It became that, due to the people that Reddit banned first. For quite a while (I forgot it was called Whoaverse) it was far more how Reddit used to be, with open discussions.

Yeah I don't know, I was never a big tweeter although I used it at some point for networking. But eventually I didn't use it anymore, emptied my profile and it was largely left unused for years. Once Elon Musk went crazy I eventually deleted my account.

So I've tried Mastodon because I'm also interested in a service operated by a more neutral org but I found it too random. Bluesky seemed quite nice, kind of like a UX friendly Mastodon.

Most people I follow seem interested in talking about tech and not so much politics which I find quite refreshing. Also it's quite easy to onboard and enjoy the platform without having to make it a huge effort.

This is inauguration week and a lot of things are happening. Many of those things impact tech. Last week my BlueSky was 10% politics and now it’s 100% politics, if you define stuff like “it is very bad that the CDC can no longer communicate about H5N1 infection data” to be politics.