If you want microblogging social media just use mastodon (or one of it’s forks). Even if Bluesky is decent now, it’s owned by venture capital, so it’s only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
Mastodon is not a viable alternative if you actually want to follow people. I tried to use it multiple times but almost nobody I care about is there. I’d love for Mastodon to be more popular but it just isn’t.
Sure. Right now, everyone has to make a trade-off between accepting a smaller network and engaging with corporate garbage designed to create rage and clicks. Personally I’m happy to sit on the smaller network and contribute a bit and wait for it to build naturally. That’s why I’m here on Lemmy too.
I do like Mastodon as a platform, but it seems nobody really bothers to actually use it for communication. Just drop-posting updates on things with zero replies.
Maybe since it doesn’t have all the addiction patterns or algos like other apps do? I’m really not sure.
I was considering going through the hassle of setting up a Mastodon server for me and my family and friends only but… something tells me I’d run into the same problem lol.
…People just seem too busy and tired and scattered on 15 different incompatible social apps and geographic locations to bother with each other anymore. :(
I only use it sporadically, but when I do, I often write replies and get replies. I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more). I’m not convinced the reply rate is significantly lower than BS or twitter…
Re: your last comment: for sure. To me that’s another bonus of fediverse, e.g. since mastodon is at least partially able to interact with Lemmy and other fediverse apps, and that will presumably improve over time, eventually you will be able to do at lot of cross-app interaction from one place.
There’s a few problems with Bluesky if you’re looking for a platform that won’t eventually turn to shit.
- The platform is not meaningfully decentralized. With Bluesky directing its future, they have the power to do whatever they want with it, including attempting to monetize and clamp down on access.
- Because of point 1 above, Bluesky is able to easily censor users.
- To fix points 1 & 2 above you have to run the full stack: a PDS (~$5/month), relay (~$30/month), and AppView (~$300/month), which is prohibitively expensive for most people.
Hosting your own mastodon instance, which cannot be easily blanket-censored costs ~$5 bucks a month.
If a system is the outcome it produces, Mastodon is a platform for the people, Bluesky a platform for large orgs.
If you’re signing up for ATproto, I’d avoid Bsky and go for Blacksky instead. Although on Blacksky, the two public PDSes you can pick are
cryptoanarchy.networkandmyatproto.social.Also, Bsky has been trying to push ID lately while Blacksky isn’t yet, but there’s the chance that Bsky corporate could start to get hostile against Blacksky and other third parties and start to block them at some point.
It’s fine but discovery still sucks and genrally it’s very low effort. I’d recommend spending the first few hours finding the right profiles to follow as the general post quality is very low but there are gems worth finding.
I’d say if you’re looking for a microblogging site, the best experience is following Bluesky accounts via bridgy from mastodon or piefed or misskey or something. Most accounts don’t bridge, so you mostly avoid getting dragged into things, but the big accounts do so you can mostly follow what’s going on.
Bluesky has a lot of libs, which is certainly better then twitter these days, tho annoying in its own way sometimes (most recently: platner glazing up til he finally dropped.) more robust blocking then twitter, and lets you subscribe to lists of shitters to block. I have had issues with bots but they’ve been fairly easy to spot, and largely resolved when I subscribed to a list that simply blocks everyone who follows 10k+ people.
