With respect to Blue Sky, which I was specifically addressing, it only has 3 million active users vs Mastodon’s 8 million right now though, which also somewhat obviates the whole network effect for new BS users. Not to mention since it is also decentralized, it does still suffer from the issue of instancing. About the only thing it may have going for it is an algorithm. I don’t honestly speak to that since I’ve only been there briefly, but since Twitter ran just fine without one and attracted tons of users (and got a lot of them angry when they switched to an algorithm), I suspect it isn’t a huge deciding factor for a lot of users.
I guess my point is… Blue Sky is still trying to launch and struggling. Mastodon is much more mature and only going to accelerate into the network effect more rapidly from here on out as well as standing a much better chance of not just being enshitified 5-7 years down the road, so when choosing between the two, I would definitely encourage any friends leaving Xitter to join Mastodon rather than Blue Sky.
Also, I feel like the users that care about algorithms and following Drake or whoever are just going to stick with Xitter anyway, because they really don’t care about all the “drama” of who owns it or what they are doing with their data.