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.
But then wouldn’t you just use X instead of Bluesky?
Do you really need me to tell you why I’m not using the nazi pedophile transphobia platform?
Plus, most people I used to follow there have moved over to Bluesky a long time ago. I would’ve preferred it if everyone moved to Mastodon instead but for now Bluesky is at least acceptable.
So I guess the worry (echoed in this thread as well) is that Bluesky could become the same type of platform, given the people and investors behind it. Only time will tell
It’s true that many mainstream accounts are not on mastodon but much of that can be remedied by following Threads and Flipboard accounts. Plus, you avoid the ads.
True, I haven’t really given Mastodon a shot since it started to be able to federate with Threads and that can definitely help! But that move was also controversial on its own. I’m not sure whether my instance even federates with Threads but of course you can always move or make your own.
I wouldn’t really call the accounts I follow mainstream. It’s leftists, leftist YouTubers, queer and especially trans people. And those mostly found a home on Bluesky especially after Meta changed their policy and started to allow a lot of questionable things like saying queer people are mentally ill. Which also made me delete my Instagram account, so it’s not like I don’t have any principles. Although to be fair I was never particularly active there to begin with.
Mastodon has many queer and trans people. There are entire instances. But they might not be your particular people.
it’s corpo social media run by transphobes so yeah the latter
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
Eventually turn to shit means it could still be good for like a decade.
True! But personally I’m okay with not contributing to the next facebook/Zucc or Twitter/Elmo. Long-term it’s in our best interest to build on platforms that serve us, not their creators, even if it takes them 10 years to slowly pull the rug from underneath us.
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.
Why would you use another privately owned platform that’s likely to enshittify?
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
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.
*libs. They are not leftists other than idpol lol.
