What does Bluesky have that Mastodon doesn't?

ada , 9 months ago

Artificial scarcity (invites) and VC funding

whatupwiththat , 9 months ago

like shooting fish in a barrel

UtMan1988 , 9 months ago

Funding from the Vietcong? Interesting…

FireTower , 9 months ago

Venture Capital

B1naryB0t , 9 months ago

Voice Chat

thisisawayoflife , 9 months ago

It’s the plot from Missing In Action 4

UtMan1988 , 9 months ago

You would think after the first 3 times they would’ve brought a cell phone, or maybe figured the armed forces weren’t for them…

spiderman , 9 months ago

People just join it thinking it’s Jack Dorsey’s next twitter.

cupcakezealot , 9 months ago

A megalomaniac owner

spiritedpause , 9 months ago

Are you referring to Jack Dorsey? He’s not the owner, he just gave them grant money in the beginning. It’s a non-profit so technically no individual “owns” it.

Wiz , 9 months ago

Wait - are you sure it’s non-profit? If so, why the VC money?

huginn , 9 months ago

No, he’s wrong (obviously) it’s a for profit startup.

It’s not currently making money but that’s different than nonprofit obviously.

He’s right about the Jack part though.

nixfreak , 9 months ago

He’s endorsing Kennedy so yeah there’s that hot mess.

density , 9 months ago

ew gross

spiritedpause , 9 months ago

Ah yeah i stand corrected:

“Prior to the seed round, Bluesky’s website described the company as a Public Benefit LLC owned by Graber and other Bluesky employees.[33] Post-seed round, the company describes itself as a public-benefit C Corp.”

huginn , 9 months ago

Mastodon is nonprofit. Blue sky is for profit.

You’re right about the Dorsey part.

cupcakezealot , 9 months ago

oooh i stand corrected anywho that makes me more anxious to try it if they would just send me my gd invite that i requested like a year ago ;__;

Quill7513 , 9 months ago

A cult leader in Jack Dorsey

Natanael , 9 months ago

Jack literally deleted his bluesky account and ran off to nostr

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

A noted cryptobro ran off to join the other cryptobros on Cryptobro Central.

What. A. Surprise.

BeefPiano , 9 months ago

• No HOA complaining that you didn’t CW a picture with eye contact or food or alcohol or matter
• More witty people from X
• No drama about who is defederating with who

MyFairJulia , 9 months ago

Which instance have you been on?

BeefPiano , 9 months ago

My instance is great, although I wish we would switch to glitch-soc so we could have instance-only visibility on posts. I don’t really see much inter-instance drama and I generally don’t get harassed by people who think I need to post a certain way (maybe because I’ve been on Masto since 2018 and they have been on less than a year?)

But those are still legitimate problems for a lot of people.

Whiskeyomega , 9 months ago

cupoftea.social says hello :wave: runs on glitch and has boosts in the timeline.

SnokenKeekaGuard , 9 months ago

Tho I agree with all the comments I have to say the general vibe of bluesky is more playful and fun compared to mastadon, perhaps its just my bias. But just like lemmy generally feels like a nice place to be so does bluesky- the vibe feels inviting.

willya , 9 months ago

Have an invite?

SnokenKeekaGuard , 9 months ago

No i’m sorry

Granite , 9 months ago

I do. DM me.

Note: I only have 1 available right now.

willya , 9 months ago

I DMed let me know if kbin/Lemmy messaging is broken.

Granite , 9 months ago

It must be because I got this comment, but not a DM. I’ll try to DM you.

Edit: I tried to send a message but 403 error. :/

willya , 9 months ago

Well that’s ridiculous. Had no idea that wasn’t possible til just now.

Granite , 9 months ago

I can post the invite code here, but you’ll have to be fast lol. Let me know

willya , 9 months ago

Alright, I’ll try lol

Granite , 9 months ago

bsky-social-zaplb-ptgw6

willya , 9 months ago

Got it, thanks!

Hubi , 9 months ago

I’ve got an account on Bluesky and I’m not sure if I agree. Like 90% of the posts I’ve seen on there are about Bluesky itself, there wasn’t really anything beyond that.

SnokenKeekaGuard , 9 months ago

Well small new platforms do have a lotta posts about themselves, lemmy isnt new but is still full of posts about lemmy

Hubi , 9 months ago

I generally agree, but I felt like Bluesky was on a whole different level.

be_excellent_to_each_other , 9 months ago

I think the issue is that there's a slow trickle of people who have just gotten in and go "Wow I just got in, has anyone got any tips?"

Find one or more feeds you like and pin them. I use the newly created For You feed (which algorithmically puts stuff there it thinks you will like) and a couple of topical feeds that are specific to my interests. I think it's great. Way more content that I care about than there ever was on twitter, and way way more engagement between folks.

I'm a big proponent of Mastodon/Firefish in general, but while they win in volume, Bluesky is already pulling ahead for me in signal to noise ratio. (I think that's very subjective to what things interest you, so YMMV.)

dpkonofa , 9 months ago

Yeah, if you can get past all the posts about Reddit. Lemmy users mostly spend time bitching about Reddit, Apple, and Microsoft. It’s exhausting.

GillyGumbo , 9 months ago

And 90% of posts on lemmy seem to be about reddit…

maegul , 9 months ago

Main positive thing I’ve heard is that it has a different vibe and culture that some might find more open and fun and sometimes even less problematic. That’s just hearsay, I’m not on there, but I’ve heard it from people I like and trust (on masto).

SmashingSquid , 9 months ago

Yeah it’s basically old twitter before all the political drama and bots. The discover tab isn’t full of rage bait. I expect if you stop needing an invite to get in it’ll go down hill quickly.

lowered_lifted , 9 months ago

Invites are really common on other sites now that a critical mass has been reached where people have invited everyone they know who is interested already and are like selling them, there are already accounts that farm engagement on there like “funny cat pics of the day” or something and it will indeed have some cat pics taken from wherever but the point of the account is to follow thousands of accounts to get followed back, and thereby build a following to sell off. It’s an extremely clumsy strategy but it’s being pursued often enough that you can’t just assume a bluesky account isn’t a bad actor. So if that is the threshold then it’s already been reached.

AccidentallySober , 9 months ago

An invite-only strategy straight out of the early 2000s

ram , 9 months ago

Forgive my ramblings, but here’s the main differences I see, from a community perspective:

Bluesky’s for people who loved twitter circa 2015
Mastodon’s for people who loved the format but hated the way the platform made use of it. The community is FOSS-focused and anti-corporate.
Bluesky folks are anti-corporate, but they still want their social media to be on a single platform and tend to dislike federation
Mastodon folks tend to be in smaller circles and more tech enthused

Features-wise, Mastodon kills the algorithm in favour of chronological timelines and lists, while Bluesky embraces algorithms, allowing people to even make their own algorithms for the platform. Bluesky’s AT Proto uses “DIDs” to identify users, which are associated directly with a domain^[or subdomain]. This means that when federation does eventually happen, usernames will just be @my.domain.com instead of ActivityPub’s @actor.

Federation’s still not enabled so I have no clue how things will look and feel on that front, nor am I familiar enough with the protocol to make any claim about how versatile it is. ActivityPub is flexible enough to be a Twitter clone, a reddit clone, a blogging platform, a youtube clone, a twitch clone, a goodreads clone, or several other formats. AT Proto’s currently only proven to work for a Twitter clone.

Xepher , 9 months ago

I would argue that most Bluesky users don’t necessarily dislike federation, but rather have no idea what it is, or what the larger Fediverse is.

HipPriest , 9 months ago

Someone I'm in a Discord group with wanted an invite to bluesky because it was more familiar to him than Mastodon.

He pretty much wanted a like-for-like replacement for Twitter, though to his credit he had already tried Mastodon before dismissing it out of hand.

It's not that he disliked it exactly, but he wasn't that interested by what he saw so didn't stick with it - to each their own

Corgana , 9 months ago

Bluesky folks are anti-corporate

Bluesky is a for profit company with a crypto person as the CEO and Jack Dorsey on the board so good luck to them I guess

dameoutlaw , 9 months ago

It’s a public benefit

ram , 9 months ago

Oh ya, no, 100%. The company is still a for-profit corporation that needs to make ends meet come the 31st. The userbase is what I’m talking about there, and specifically their unprincipled stance wrt corporate control, in paying lip-service to hating corpos, yet wanting everything to be structured around a centralized entity and team who makes it easy to blame someone (1) for anything that goes wrong.

xc2215x , 9 months ago

More non political stuff most likely.

sentient_loom , 9 months ago

Better posts. Feeds (like categories replacing hashtags) are great.

gnuplusmatt , 9 months ago

without hashtags, I cant discover anything on bluesky, its made discoverability so much harder than mastodon imho

Natanael , 9 months ago

They’re going to add native hashtags. Not prioritized though

petunia , 9 months ago

Feeds/timelines are first-class citizens in the AT protocol and are decoupled from account hosting.

On Mastodon, your timelines are computed by the same server that hosts your data. Consequently, signing up to a server to have an account on the fediverse is the same thing as joining a community. You follow the servers rules and share the same local timeline as everyone else on that server.

On Bluesky, feeds are arbitrary, fungible and provided by any server, and it can be computed/curated/moderated however they like. So communities are “built” around feeds rather than around account hosting providers.

The AT protocol also has “real” account portability (though I have not seen this demonstrated in practice atproto.com/guides/overview#account-portability). On Mastodon, account “portability” is a delicate dance that requires the cooperation of both the origin and destination server.

Mastodon has something that Bluesky currently doesn’t: real federation. The Bluesky server that everyone signs up to doesn’t federate with anyone else, since the whole protocol is still a work-in-progress.

Corgana , 9 months ago

My money’s on BS never federating at all. Mastodon Instances are communities unto themselves. The way BS is set up means an “instance” is essentially just free additional hosting for BlueSky Inc. It’s decentralized similarly to how crypto is decentralized. Of course, what else would one expect from Jack.

Pixelle , 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

Corgana , 9 months ago

For real. It’s not like Twitter was markedly different before Elon.

Natanael , 9 months ago

There’s a sandbox with federation with third party clients already live. Every piece of the system can be federated or substituted.

If somebody wanted to fork out and federate in open now they could. They aren’t doing so because it’s still work in progress, especially moderation tooling and scaling needs improvements

timconspicuous , 9 months ago

I like Mastodon and the Fediverse, I really do, but I just can’t deny that all the good posters that made Twitter enjoyable moved to Bluesky. My Mastodon feed is nothing but journalists, activists, developers, but very little fun shitposting.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

See, that’s exactly why I like Mastodon and want nothing to do with Bluesky. Sounds like we’re both happy this way.

timconspicuous , 9 months ago

That’s fine, I just want either of them to actually kill twitter for good though and it just doesn’t look like it’s gonna be Mastodon. With Threads potentially joining the Fediverse, I guess who knows.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

News Flash!

Twitter will never stop being a thing. Myspace is still a thing, after all. Twitter will just stop being a relevant thing. Like Myspace.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

As for Threads, any threads sites or account gets instablocked on identification for me. I will not peacefully submit to Zuck the Fuck’s embrace/extend/extinguish strategy. I basically want all corporate surveillance antisocial media to die. Ruthlessly murdered, ideally, in a gruesome living vivisection.

timconspicuous , 9 months ago

Sure, I just meant if Threads and maybe Tumblr are serious about joining the Fediverse, maybe the whole AT Protocol that Bluesky is trying to build will fall into obscurity.

Pixelle , 9 months ago

deleted_by_author

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

When I saw the kinds of people who were getting invites to Bluesky I knew I wanted nothing to do with Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0. As you said, it’s just going to be clout-chasing assholes all over again. I guess I prefer small town life to life in the big city, digitally speaking. (Physically I prefer the precise opposite.)

rbos , 9 months ago

Oh lord that would sell me on mastodon instantly if I weren’t already there.

timconspicuous , 9 months ago

Perhaps I should clarify: by “good posters”, I don’t mean Wendy’s epically dunking on McDonald’s and I don’t mean “night water hits different” lowest common denominator posters, just ordinary people like you and me shooting the shit. I think it’s sad Mastodon seems to have the reputation that people can’t crack a joke there.

Bebo , 9 months ago

OK this tells me that bluesky is definitely not for me. I am happy with Mastodon. So long as the people I follow (from technology, science, research, literature, owners of cats, dogs, etc etc) remain on Mastodon, I will remain happy.

lowered_lifted , 9 months ago

If you attempt to shitpost on Mastodon things don’t usually go very well. The vibe had to match twitter circa 2013 or else it would never have felt safe enough for the first colonizing species of memes like alf hog to develop like the first plants in a lava field

poVoq , 9 months ago

Bluesky is to Mastodon & ActivityPub, what Matrix is to XMPP/IRC… a completely over-engineered system, ignoring all well established international standards and run by a for-profit entity with venture capital funding.

density , 9 months ago

that actually explains why i find matrix so annoying, thanks.

Wiz , 9 months ago

And when the venture capital runs out, they will need to turn a profit. And the cycle of enshittification will continue.

mojo , 9 months ago

Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have. I don’t think you understand how the Matrix protocol at works, and I assume you are blindly repeating what you read online that XMPP must be better because it supposedly has less lines of code, though I’m sure you didn’t check that either.

poVoq , 9 months ago

I hate to inform you that I know the insides of both pretty well and run both myself on my server and have evaluated the differences extensively 🤷‍♂️

Oh and:

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/617700e5-38f6-4f5b-a305-a19b5c4d5d8d.webp

mojo , 9 months ago

That’s awesome, and I still know that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But damn you made me a soyjack, that definitely tells me you’ve actually looked into the technical differences.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

Matrix is literally the best decentralized real time chat we have.

What an utterly depressing statement. Because Matrix is utter shit.

mojo , 9 months ago

Go ahead and elaborate on what problems the protocol has.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

I don’t give a shit about the “protocol”. I give a shit about the end experience: the system, not a single component of it. (The fact that you’re so narrowly defining the range of critique is very telling and noted, incidentally.)

I’ve given Matrix three tries now. Three times Element has shit its pants, lost all my keys, refused to recognize the backups I made using its own tools, and made me start over from scratch. It’s a fucking shit system, no matter how good or bad its “protocol” is.

Come back when you’ve got a product that doesn’t suck so hard it can suck bowling balls through garden hoses. (Well, no, don’t come back. Matrix is on the permanent shitpile for me along with Emacs, Haskell, Internet Explorer and other such software fiascos of epic proportions.) But start pitching the product when you’ve got a product that isn’t a festering pustule that periodically pops and spreads its grotesque fluids all over the place, not now when it’s like a rusty chainsaw made without a kickback guard.

One of the first things that you’d need to do to make the system not suck matter out of galactic core black holes is to look over the “Fallacies of Distributed Computing” and make sure that you didn’t interpret it as an instruction manual instead of a warning against them.

mojo , 9 months ago

It’s not narrowly defined lol, you literally said Matrix so I asked about Matrix. XMPP is a protocol, so obviously I’m going to ask why you prefer one protocol over the other. It’s like saying you hate the http protocol, but really you’re actually talking about a specific browser, it makes no sense.

You not liking Element is an entirely different conversation. Which Matrix had a ton of full fledged clients. Element is like the Ubuntu of matrix clients.

ttmrichter , 9 months ago

The other Matrix clients were worse.

The entire ecosystem is shit. Fix it if you want people who aren’t dedicated fanbois to use it.

Fizz , 9 months ago

@otter money behind it