People love corporations

Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).

People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.

So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.

And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.

Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).

It’s multiple factors but boils down to them being easier for non-techie people to access. It’s also a culture issue. Bluesky culture is more like Mastodon than not but it is more diverse and shifts younger. Lots of gatekeepers and harassers ruined it for would be mastodon users particularly Black and Brown folk that were harassed out of the space. One of the biggest minority ran instances was shut down due to overwhelming harassment. People also don’t want to be preached to nor want to be told how to use their own damn social account and be told they’re using it wrong. Most people legit just wanted Twitter without Musk.

A marketing budget. The Fediverse has none, and we’re competing with the big boys.

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Threads was because if you had an Instagram account it ported over.

Bluesky was the Twitter clone made by the old Twitter CEO.

Most people didn’t have a problem with Twitter being a corporation, they had a problem with the new owner of the corporation making the experience terrible with his new changes.

@dch82 mastodon can’t go mainstream because its emphasis on decentralization is too prominent in its communication, which complicates its adoption

However, modern social networks can still stand out, provided that federation is natural and not explicitly mentioned—similar to how Threads operates currently

People dumb.

There are a lot of people I follow who moved to Mastodon, that now appear to have moved to Bluesky (I’m seeing posts on there from people I know used to post on Mastodon).

I’m not sure why. If I move over it’ll be because everybody else is there. At the moment I’m not using it much.

People I spoke to didn’t understand how a server and an app could be disconnected. They also didn’t want to learn what the hell federation was and why people could register the same username for some reason. By the time you get to “it’s like email” they’ve already downloaded another app.

Most people didn’t want the Fediverse. They wanted Twitter that wasn’t as shit as Twitter. Nobody cares about ActivityPub or ATProto, those are side notes to usable apps and experiences.

Bluesky also has more people go follow and interact with. Mastodon is for people who have a favourite Linux distro and people who follow people who have a favourite Linux distro. Bluesky is for everyone else.

Threads came free with an existing account. People downloaded it out of curiosity and were already signed in and set up.

The guy behind Technology Connections is on Mastodon and has explained several times what terrible consequences having more than a few friends follow you can have for usability. None of these apps were designed for a million followers, human moderation falls short and automatic moderation doesn’t work. Every server has a different view of existing comments so they’ll think they’re the first to make a certain reply, causing a horde of reply guys to all say the same thing. His complaints are very valid and I don’t expect him to last long on there, but he’s doing his best to stick around. If he goes, I’m sure at least a few people will go with him.

Platforms like Bluesky have it easier dealing with moderation and are willing to use automatic moderation. It’s hardly perfect, but it works better than not moderating anything until a report comes in.

As depressing as it sounds, most Twitter users actually like Twitter. They’re fully okay with all of its dystopian features (some even idolize pre-Musk Twitter). Mastodon is a break from Twitter in many ways, whereas bluesky is just another Twitter in their eyes (many of them probably dgaf about federation and ignore it).

I used mastodon for a year. It didn’t really work out for me. I just took so much effort to find content or build an audience.

I didn’t go to threads because it’s owned by Zuck. But Bluesky is FOSS add free and decentralised, so I tried it out, and honestly (I’ll probably get hate here for this) but the experience is far better than mastodon. There’s an algorithm, everything works. Mastodon had always been buggy for me. The UI is nice, the community is nice etc.

Plus thanks to bridgy, all of my bluesky posts are automatically displayed on mastodon and I can follow people from mastodon on bluesky.

Valid question, but Americans in particular are easily swayed by the fact that the corporate ownership is listed as a “Public Benefit Corporation.” Bluesky is a PBC and for most people that’s enough “proof” that they will “be for the public good.”

In that it is set up to “benefit the public good” people just… buy into that, even if the company isn’t actually benefitting the public good.

Look at how long it took for people to wise up that the Susan G. Komen foundation was spending most of its money on their CEOs and ads and very little on actually helping people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_G._Komen_for_the_Cure#Pinkwashing

For the general public, Open Source generally means “difficult to set up and use with bad user interface.”

And yes, the whole self-hosting thing with numerous servers is confusing to people who have never had to step outside of the corporate-dominated internet.

All that is self-evident based on the original reddit exodus to here on Lemmy. The initial exodus lead to tons of people complaining about lack of features on Lemmy with very few people actually stepping up to contribute to the code-base to bring those features to light. They’re just far too used to private company doing all that “for free” (*cough for all your private data cough) and struggle to understand how the different way it is set up means you don’t get all the fancy features from the get-go.

So people saw an option with corporate sponsorship and money behind it, and they leap to that. Also I’m sure Bluesky is investing in advertising their product, which is competing with zero advertising dollars spend on the no-corporate fediverse.

They probably have good discovery and trending post mechanisms. Mastodon makes it a point not to have one, which results in a wholly uninteresting feed for the average user. I’m only on mastodon, but I very rarely use it, because it mostly sucks unless you spend several, several hours trying to track down fun accounts to follow yourself.

Fediverse sounds too much like metaverse so people assume it’s crypto bullshit