Bluesky Cons: doesnt have videos or gifs. Its glitchy. Doesnt federate. Has VC funding that they will have to repay with huge interest meaning they will start the enshittificatiom process and betray users’ wants by forcing ads and other nonsense.
Bluesky Pros: the usernames system is better imo. having just one @ and working as subdomains or using your domains. In the future i can see people just placing their bsky subdomain places so you can just click it and go straight to their account where as on mastodon you list on your @user and then they have to go to their own instance and copy paste it in search and then click follow (assuming theyre not defederated).
The custom algorithms that you can make and share is a great feature. Signing in to third party apps and other services that use bluesky (like the clubhouse type app) lets tou use your same account and you easily make different passwords for each separate app by using the official app.
More artists are going to bsky than mastodon and the main art mastodon instance is run by an admin that seems to get into a bunch of drama and defederates from other instances often and based on whims with no input from the users.
Mastodon Cons: no custom algorithms, no explore/For You feature to discover new things you’re interested in. Hashtags are ugly and its annoying to follow a hashtag and see every post in the hashtag which can easily be spammed. I would much prefer to have a chronologically order timeline that I can customize to show me a suggested post after every 4 chronological posts and have the recommendations based on by likes, users i follow’s likes, and topics I manually input that it detects using text/image recognition in the posts.
Mastodon Pros: it federates, has no VC funding, works well with Lemmy and pixelfed, community feel and less dunking for likes, lots of third party apps, AGPL, lots of forks and community development.
Cons for both: Neither are good in keeping up with realtime updates on news and breaking events like twitter was
Pros for both: open source, not fully controlled by any one person/group, no elon, no ads, no ragefarming for views and ad dollars, no shady practices like slowing down links to competitors and websites the owner doesnt like, no shadowbanning keywords from search like twitter and threads does.
I personally use Mastodon and have used it for years and I very very rarely check Bluesky anymore. I do hope mastodon adopts the custom algorithms, app passwords, and username setup from Bluesky though