OP If you want the best of both worlds try WAFRN. It’s both ATProto (bluesky) and activitypub (mastodon, etc) so you can engage with both communities. It also has some pretty robust blocking features for removing content you don’t want to see.
We need to learn from past mistakes.
When Jeff Bezos buys bluesky in 2035 and change its name to BlueDildo what?
Just go to Mastodon for a twitter like micro blogging experience.
It’s fine but discovery still sucks and genrally it’s very low effort. I’d recommend spending the first few hours finding the right profiles to follow as the general post quality is very low but there are gems worth finding.
If you want microblogging social media just use mastodon (or one of it’s forks). Even if Bluesky is decent now, it’s owned by venture capital, so it’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
Mastodon is not a viable alternative if you actually want to follow people. I tried to use it multiple times but almost nobody I care about is there. I’d love for Mastodon to be more popular but it just isn’t.
Sure. Right now, everyone has to make a trade-off between accepting a smaller network and engaging with corporate garbage designed to create rage and clicks. Personally I’m happy to sit on the smaller network and contribute a bit and wait for it to build naturally. That’s why I’m here on Lemmy too.
My entire point is that this isn’t how it works for me. I use these platforms to keep up with personalities and organisations I care about. Almost none of those are on Mastodon, so it’s just straight-up useless to me. If Bluesky suddenly disappeared and Mastodon stayed exactly the same I wouldn’t switch, I’d just use neither.
I do like Mastodon as a platform, but it seems nobody really bothers to actually use it for communication. Just drop-posting updates on things with zero replies.
Maybe since it doesn’t have all the addiction patterns or algos like other apps do? I’m really not sure.
I was considering going through the hassle of setting up a Mastodon server for me and my family and friends only but… something tells me I’d run into the same problem lol.
…People just seem too busy and tired and scattered on 15 different incompatible social apps and geographic locations to bother with each other anymore. :(
I don’t know, I’ve been on mastodon for like 8 years now and have never had any problem connecting with other people.
I only use it sporadically, but when I do, I often write replies and get replies. I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more). I’m not convinced the reply rate is significantly lower than BS or twitter…
Re: your last comment: for sure. To me that’s another bonus of fediverse, e.g. since mastodon is at least partially able to interact with Lemmy and other fediverse apps, and that will presumably improve over time, eventually you will be able to do at lot of cross-app interaction from one place.
I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more).
“This game becomes fun after 51st boss” energy.
There’s a few problems with Bluesky if you’re looking for a platform that won’t eventually turn to shit.
- The platform is not meaningfully decentralized. With Bluesky directing its future, they have the power to do whatever they want with it, including attempting to monetize and clamp down on access.
- Because of point 1 above, Bluesky is able to easily censor users.
- To fix points 1 & 2 above you have to run the full stack: a PDS (~$5/month), relay (~$30/month), and AppView (~$300/month), which is prohibitively expensive for most people.
Hosting your own mastodon instance, which cannot be easily blanket-censored costs ~$5 bucks a month.
If a system is the outcome it produces, Mastodon is a platform for the people, Bluesky a platform for large orgs.
And mastodon should be for official/gov instances, they shouldn’t rely on some techbros stuffs. And people following those would make the jump, media are doing it to see Trump daily bullshit, so they would for other, and it would be easier because it’s federated not like Trump Social
What about blacksky? Its completely independent afaik?
Blacksky is an option. But the point about the platform not being meaningfully decentralized still stands. Your current options with [*]sky are equivalent to only having the option of using either mastodon.social or mstdn.jp, the two biggest mastodon social platforms.
On the Mastodon side, you have the option of nearly 9k servers to choose from.
If you’re signing up for ATproto, I’d avoid Bsky and go for Blacksky instead. Although on Blacksky, the two public PDSes you can pick are
cryptoanarchy.networkandmyatproto.social.Also, Bsky has been trying to push ID lately while Blacksky isn’t yet, but there’s the chance that Bsky corporate could start to get hostile against Blacksky and other third parties and start to block them at some point.
It’s not quite as unhinged as Twitter, but it’s still corporate-owned social media run by some very questionable people. It also had a huge bot problem; when I deleted my account it had ~300 bot followers (and like 10 real ones). That was a bit over a year ago, so it might’ve improved by now, but I don’t have high hopes
Last time I tried Bluesky was the start of this year, with a week had like 20 bot accounts following me, maybe 1 real person
If you want to interact with normal people, it’s the least-bad game in town. You might even find some established journalists, musicians, authors and such.
If you prefer interacting with freaks and weirdos, stay here with us.
Are those normal people, though?
Mostly not, but there are normal people among them. In the fediverse, it’s mostly those who feel that they have no place anywhere else. (Occasionally a curious normie makes an account. You see vast swathes of these accounts which were last logged into 2 1/2 years ago while they engage and build clout somewhere where there are others like them.)
Why would you use another privately owned platform that’s likely to enshittify?
Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes (most recently: platner glazing up til he finally dropped.) more robust blocking then twitter, and lets you subscribe to lists of shitters to block. I have had issues with bots but they’ve been fairly easy to spot, and largely resolved when I subscribed to a list that simply blocks everyone who follows 10k+ people.
Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes
Yep. Twotter is ranting Nazis, BS is virtue signalling lefties.
Pretty sure the Nazis at Twitter do just as much virtue signalling. Every play in the right wing playbook these days is to pretend to care about a value and then do nothing for, or the opposite of, it.
*libs. They are not leftists other than idpol lol.
America has a different definition of ‘liberal’ though
America has a different definition of leftism, but I’m no American and come from a country with actual leftist movements.
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The only way anyone saw any post was for me to hijack another person’s feed. Otherwise, no engagement on anything
I use it regularly and enjoy it, especially in the food, comedy, gaming, and programming communities. If you give it a go I highly recommend trying the “For You” feed. You pin it to your list of feeds, and it produces such shockingly relevant content. It definitely has a mixture of folks on it though, despite that people claim it’s one group on one platform and another group on Bsky.
I actually find the mixture of takes to not be all that different from Lemmy, just less pro-Chinese posts, and maybe even more anti-AI stances than I’ve seen around here.
If you want to hide from politics though, “For You” can definitely be a bit of a bubble. Being a left or right swipe away from escaping your bubble is a nice compromise imo.
I only just started dabbling in Bluesky. I like that your username is federated, which meant I’m using Bluesky without a Bluesky account, since I signed up elsewhere first.
It’s definitely a lot more popular than Masto, et al, which isn’t always a good thing. Sure there’s all the famous people, but it makes it harder to find real people to follow. Or at least for me.
I have enjoyed the For You tab though.
I like BlueSky, and it’s nowhere near as unhinged as Twitter.
As with how Twitter used to be, it’s just a question of curatung your feed. If someone is an asshole you block them and move on.
The key difference is that you can choose to have a feed of only those you follow, and that’s what you actually get, not algorithm-driven nonsense.
I’d say if you’re looking for a microblogging site, the best experience is following Bluesky accounts via bridgy from mastodon or piefed or misskey or something. Most accounts don’t bridge, so you mostly avoid getting dragged into things, but the big accounts do so you can mostly follow what’s going on.
