Mastodon & Bluesky
2024/11/24
I use Mastodon, but recently Bluesky has been gaining popularity. I find this interesting, particularly because I hadn't given Bluesky any thought before. In my mind, I assumed that it was one of those nazi bar social media platforms. Recently, something has happened.
Elon Musk did yet another idiotic thing, making many people swap platforms.
This is incredibly interesting for the platform. Last time on Twitter burning to the ground when Elon initially purchased it, there was much more focus on Mastodon. Now, Bluesky has taken the spotlight, having more than double Mastodon's users. Both of these platforms are Twitter clones, but Bluesky is much closer to the same as Twitter. Bluesky has an algorithm and such similar to Twitter, but Mastodon doesn't. You have to manually populate your feed on Mastodon, following hastags and users you're interested in seeing. Bluesky is under the control of much of the old Twitter board pre-Elon, which is part of what confused me. Mastodon is build on ActivityPub, a web standard endorsed by the W3C, whereas Bluesky's incompatible standard the At protocol is entirely their own creation. Both of these are standards are fully open source, so honestly either way is such a signficant improvement from Twitter, but on Bluesky I can still only use that one website. I can only use that one interface to interact with the platform. On Bluesky, you don't receive the benefit of ActivityPub, which is that I can take my account and followers elsewhere with a single click. On Bluesky, you can choose a different hosting provider to host your content, but it doesn't actually change anything. If I host my own profile, I'm still stuck with their app and their interface. If https://bsky.app goes down, it doesn't matter that I'm running my own server, the app is down. If Bluesky, say, gets purchased by a crypto company, I can't easily move my followers to a different platform. This is my main issue with Bluesky. I hope it's successful I really do it's so much better than Twitter, but it shouldn't be the answer. Mastodon isn't the answer either. Mastodon is a platform that is far too nerdy and takes far too much effort to use. To use Mastodon you have to pick a server (the one you pick doesn't matter don't overthink it) and then follow all the accounts you want to see. The average person won't want to deal with that. The real solution, I think, is a platform like Bluesky using the ActivityPub protocol. There are many parts of Bluesky that suck right now, you can tell it's much newer and less polished than Mastodon (Mastodon's been around since 2016) and is actually lacking an edit button.
There are a few of these little things missing from Bluesky, but I think it is in the main more usable for most people. I've looked into Bluesky, but I'm sticking with Mastodon. I do hope Bluesky succeeds, and I've set up a Bluesky bridge for my Mastodon account here, (this may not work if you're watching this soon after publishing because the bridge protocol has been paused for a few days now) in case you want to follow me for whatever reason and are on Bluesky. That's all really, this is my first post on this new version of my website, which has been significantly simplified from the old version.Return Back