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.
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.
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.
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.
