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You could say Bluesky is… picking up Steam, eh?
Sorry, I have no new or interesting insights to offer, I’d hope most already get what’s happening, anyway.
Don’t worry about not having any insights, I still valve-ued the pun.
It’s nice to see other people enjoy the pun. Would be shame for it to be left4dead
All hands on Deck.
And Valve and Steamdeck accounts.
Found Steamdeck, but I can’t see a non parody Valve account - got a link/handle?
Edit: Valve Software, thank you.
Look at the boosted posts.
Thanks!
I will never not read “bluesky” as “bloo-skee”
“Toss me a bluesky, there feller.”
Mom!
Dad!
Bingo!!
Bluesky!!!
🐶
Lol
It will always be “bluey-skibidi”
I wonder why is Mastodon is not appealing to Valve.
Reach?
If I wasn’t on Lemmy, I wouldn’t even know about Mastodon. It’s not really something you hear of outside of the fediverse, in my experience. Meanwhile, BlueSky is gaining traction and talked about everywhere. Most people don’t care that it’s not exactly decentralized. Most of the things the users on the fediverse care about are not things the average, not-very-tech-saavy person cares about.
Bluesky has a good new user experience, too. Even if you do know about Mastodon, making an account is like"Welcome - figure it out, lol"
I’d bet if they went the other way, they’d get significantly fewer people signing up for the service…Steam caters to both nerds and casuals alike
Mastodon is annoyingly gatekeepy too. They are super heavy on content warnings, and tend to not play nice when someone doesn’t respect those unspoken rules.
Also, servers are much more likely to defederate with each other, due to what some perceive as “minor scuffles”.
All in all I understand why people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon, it’s simpler and the search function isn’t borked to hell and back either. Blocking is also incredibly effective on Bluesky, if you block someone neither you nor they will ever see each other’s content again.
Even my parents know what blue sky is. This is from the people that were concerned that my emails wouldn’t be able to find me when I moved house. Because “how would they know which house to go to now?”
If even they’ve heard of the platform, it’s reached the mass market.
Bluesky has 20x the user base (and the gap is growing wider every day).
I really enjoy Mastodon, but it seems to be too confusing with all the servers. I don’t know why, but maybe because people have been conditioned by big tech to use centralised services. Especially Gen Z that grew up with this very big tech controlled internet.
Especially Gen Z that grew up with this very big tech controlled internet.
Yep, I only 3 person IRL who know and uses Forum or Reddit.
Reddit is big tech these days.
Maybe for the tech bubble.Most normies I know know that reddit exists but peimarily scroll on insta.
They could just put their own instance alive,
not very hard for them, after they shown us what they can do,
They can make the changes happen, they showed us already.And thoses who wants the feed, just have to subscribe.
Valve is already under fire for Nazi content in fringe parts of Steam Community (warranted or not); I don’t think they want to tackle responsibility of moderating another large social network.
yeah ive seen this, unfortunatelly.
But they could really hire a community manager, a little team of coms, and an enginneer/technician, devoted to theirs socials services.Thats a no cost for them,
Only benefits,
Valve ceo built a billion dollars mega yacht fleet off selling proprietary games through a proprietary third party launcher. A free and open source decentralized platform does not appeal to them for obvious reasons.
“Why is Mastodon is not”
Basic grammar hard, apparently.
You could point out typos and mistakes without being condescending.
So how can I follow them from Mastodon?
This is my question too. Search results turn up Bridgy Fed, but that seems to require the account you’re interested in following to go through those steps, which none of the accounts I’m interested in are doing. At least the Threads POTUS account turned on federation so I can view it from Mastodon, but I suspect for the next four years, that account will be pretty quiet, and if it isn’t, I’ll probably want it to be.
Unfortunately, Bridgy Fed is currently opt-in. For a Bluesky user to interact with a Mastodon user, both have to follow the Bridgy Fed account. There is ongoing discussion about Mastodon instance opt-in, and making Bluesky opt-out.
I highly encourage you to participate in this conversation as a Mastodon user.
I like the OpenVibe app. That’s as close as I’ve been able to get so far.
Is bluesky really eclipsing mastodon? jeeze
The signup process for mastodon sucks massively. Unless you’re nerdy enough to sort it out, you’ll give up then and there. Bluesky is very straightforward, while offering customization to those looking for a non-mainstream experience.
Same for Lemmy tbh.
I don’t really remember signing up for mastodon so I tested it.
mastodon.social -> create new account -> agree to terms -> username + email + password -> click email verification
It’s literally standard. Maybe in the past it was worse I vaguely remember giving up maybe a year or two before I made an account on mastodon.social.
I’m not an expert but I heard languages, religions and cultures has some irrational and hard to imitate rules so that outsiders can’t join in or blend easily. Is this similar? Maybe it’s an advantage?
Whether it’s and advantage or not depends on your perspective. If you want the fediverse to supplant Big Tech, then no, having a culture which is not welcoming of outsiders is not an advantantage.
However, if you happen to be a part of Lemmy’s “in-group”, you probably don’t want a bunch of “normies” flooding in and cluttering up your feed with what you consider to be low effort shitposts, or starting drama in the comments. In that sense, maintaining a barrier to entry is an advantage because, in this mindset, if they can’t be bothered to wrap their head around a slightly more complex signup than usual, than they weren’t going to be good members of this community.
Perhaps some will disagree with my interpretation of the two popes (I meant poles, but I’m keeping the typo) of users here. To be clear, I’m not ascribing a value judgment to either position. I think both have valid points, and, frankly, I’m not sure where I come down on it.
I just went to mastadon.social for mastadon and like the biggest national lemmy instance we have, feddit. Although I have to criticize the old instance of feddit shutting down unexpectedly and I had to migrate to a newer one.
What is a Mastadon?
It’s an extinct species of mammoth. God knows why it’s named after an extinct elephant.
In the near term of course bluesky will, it has hype, it has rich tech people on it, it has 10s of millions of investment it can throw at stuff.
This is not how Mastodon or the Fediverse grows, our growth is real, not based on hyped and marketing. People come and stay here because it is a nice place, not because it is a popular or exciting new hangout spot that all the rich cool people are going to.
Well, I didn’t stay because I couldn’t figure it out unlike with Lemmy and my feed is still barely showing me anything new.
Mastodons onboarding process is truly abysmal. I think that’s the number one reason that people don’t use it. like you no one can work out how.
See y’all next time everyone gets surprised and upset when their centralized social media gets bought by a conservative sycophant.
Did they not learn a damn thing?
People are constantly say the same thing about Steam yet I don’t see any kind of pushback against everyone using that platform. Yeah it’ll suck when it eventually happens but that doesn’t mean I should have to use a more irritating service in the interim.
That’s a bit different IMO.
Moving social networks is way harder than buying goods from a different store (and there’s always piracy).
But I do take your overall point.
Two days ago BlueSky was adding more users in an hour than Mastodon was per week.
Right? 🙄
Why not Mastodon?
Because people moved to bluesky and not to mastodon.
Not true, Mastodon has millions of users
And blue sky got like 15 millions in two weeks. Look, do you really think that everyone decided to diss Mastodon? All major companies, celebrities, sport teams, you name it? Or maybe there’s a more reasonable explanation why Bluesky?
Look, do you really think that everyone decided to diss Mastodon? All major companies, celebrities, sport teams, you name it?
Look that’s what is happening
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
Twitter was bluesky before musk bought it, federation ensures that can’t easily happen to mastodon.
That’s it.
Cool. Now give me an argument why my mother would care about this fact.
maybe not your mother, but anyone who left twitter recently (because musk) should understand. that’s who we are talking about.
Let’s hope it dies quickly
Is she looking for alternatives?
If so, it sounds like she understands Twitter turned to shit and would be smart enough to not want that to happen again.
If she’s not looking for alternatives it sounds like she’s fine on Twitter.
This was an example for someone that couldnt care less about twitter and social media politics.
Then she’s probably staying on Twitter (or was never there in the first place) making this whole thread about moms moot.
That will just make them stay on X.
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
Billionares with mega yacht fleets are choosing bluesky over mastodon.
Like it or not, a regular person doesn’t give two shits about that.
Talk for yourself, the average person does indeed care about the environment. In the past years there have been massive greenwashing campaigns from companies trying to please the average customer.
Yeah because it doesn’t cost them anything to say they “do their part” when they make token “commitments”. It’s not because the average person gives a shit. Give them a choice - $5 more an hour, or instantly and forever solve climate change and see how many people would choose climate change.
People complain about having to sort trash before throwing it out. Saying “most people care about the environment” is extremely naive.
Man, I wanna live in your neighborhood. I’m surrounded by bougie people or people with bougie fantasies. They talk all the time about drinking wine on a boat.
Centralized and private = enshitification
Self hosted and federated = not prone to enshitification
Idk how simple it has to be for people but clearly I’m over estimating people
Okay. Now, explain the concept of enshitification. And do it using terms that regular folk won’t find crass.
You know how conservatives live in this bubble where they don’t even see their racism because it’s so normalized? We’re interacting within a bubble where everyone has a very high level of technical competence versus the average person, so we fail to understand just how tech illiterate others are.
Not just tech illiterate but also advertising illiterate. The regular folks I know seem happy to wade through endless platform ads and influencer sales pitches. Enshittification can really be a slowly boiling frog type scenario.
elon musk bought twitter and turned it to shit. elon (or someone else) could do that with Bluesky too, but can’t with Mastodon.
So that’s impossible with the fediverse? No way a company like Meta could have a fediverse platform?
Well the general idea of federation is not the same as “fediverse”. most “fediverse” sites are FOSS which is the main selling point in my opinion. They cannot be sold and do not rely on ad income (and thus preying on people’s cognitive weaknesses with algorithms) to operate. Federation is an added bonus on top of that which allows you to set up your own instance if you want.
Sure meta could make a federated service of some kind (like bluesky has done), but without being FOSS there’s always the high likelihood of enshittification.
Threads by Meta is on the fediverse. So by describing the fediverse as good, it sounds like Threads is just like Mastodon.
The topic is too complicated to quickly explain to a novice. Because now you have to explain FOSS, and why that’s sometimes good, but not always since bad actors have used FOSS .
Company focus on profit. even if mean overall experience get not gooder
I dumbed it down to caveman speech for those that still wouldn’t understand. It’s a simple concept all of use that have used the Internet in the past year have experienced.
The usual suspects couldnt care less. The more convenient it is the better. No matter how bad the future wil be.
I cannot imagine mastodon getting any more convenient.
I personally never like the style of twitter so I don’t use it
But when I did make an account on the mastodon app it was so simple my special needs clients could do it.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
It gives space to do servers based on specific interests if you want. I’m part of a game development server, and my “Local” tab has people on my server often talking about, and showing, things that are related to game development. And I can still follow anyone from any other Mastodon server too.
If you’re into video games, film, maybe a specific genre of music, you can have an instance dedicated to that. (It might already exist.) It’s like a virtual neighborhood, or forum. Remember forums? Those were nice. They cultivated a sense of community which made people a little more responsible in their attitudes, it feels like. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but I like the server I’m on. It’s got friendly people I can talk to without feeling the need to fill my follows with them.
Yes! I’m on a local regional server that is nice. I like that it’s locally owned and operated, and we can talk local news and events.
You know, that feels like a pretty great use case.
I should have made the obligatory link to http://mastodon-near.me/
Thanks a lot!
Oh so just like Discord, why would I need something new, I already have Discord.
Sure, but with that philosophy, why use a microblogging system at all?
5-second quip
Someone like Musk is impossible here
Freedom from tyrants, maybe
Their main business and source of money is a proprietary centralized platform. Mastodon is the opposite.
Because casual mainstream basic folk (non-techie) don’t like the slight legwork you need to do and understand the Fediverse
I saw an article from Yahoo (Source: The Independent) last week about Bluesky’s current success from Xitter refugees and it also listed other similar groups like Mastedon. What didn’t surprise me is that they said Mastedon is predominantly “techie” which includes the majority of it’s user base as “supernerds” with the site having the “steepest learning curve.” This was an op-ed from an outsider.
Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
Until fediverse advocates stop thinking of people as simple minded, they will never understand the steps needed to be relevant.
The main advantage to Bluesky’s architecture is centralized identity and distributed components.
The centralized identity is key. Unless someone figures out a way to do this in activitypub, the fediverse will remain niche.
That’s more or less what NOSTR is trying to achieve
Accurate username
Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
I think the bigger problem is that the tech press starts from the perspective that Mastodon and the Fediverse is just for techie nerds and then fills out the narrative with supporting details and so unless those narratives are challenged Mastodon and the Fediverse will never be for normal people because the Tech press and the money behind it won’t let that narrative stick in the general public’s minds.
“there’s nothing wrong with Mastedon and everyone else covering it is at fault.”
“It’s the big tech cabal are the reasons why Mastedon is not appealing to a wider audience.”
“Definitely not because the the entry point has a slight learning curve and the demographic of users are FOSS and Linux enthusiasts”
Surely not.
I am not trying to argue this isn’t also true too, my argument is that the fediverse doesn’t have a marketing department so the framework of discussion around the fediverse in mass media will always be fit to whatever the most convenient narrative is for the corporate tech world which will always be the fediverse is an obscure nerdy diy thing like ham radio or something.
That isn’t to say the fediverse doesn’t also have existential accessibility issues on multiple dimensions.
That’s great, I suppose less concentration to a single platform is a better direction.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky? I would imagine whatever ills plague Twitter would also eventually come to Bluesky, because people are there. And people are people. We don’t seem to have a solution to the problem - which is a specific subset of people intent on harm, and allowing them direct and wholesale access to the social fabric.
So easy nowadays to fabricate rage-inducing and follower-generating bait. No time for truth and no plan to really get there. How long before we see someone take a stab at a ministry of truth?
The block function is heavily used. Whole block lists get passed around quite frequently. I’ve never really seen much hate on there unless I’m clicking into something obviously heated politically. Other people may have other experiences, but the current culture there is to not engage the hate farmers and just block people instead
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In the real world, you cool down hostility by talking it out. On the internet it’s the opposite, and that approach gives the village idiot a global megaphone to radicalize or enrage others with. I think mass adoption social media is new enough that we’re still figuring out how it should work.
Isn’t it more in the real world people don’t interact with close to the number of people they do on the internet, and they never encounter or avoid a lot of people which acts like a real world filter or blocklist?
Internet is like walking in a store and then being flooded with hearing the thoughts of everyone in the store like you’re experiencing a telepathic attack.
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In the real world you don’t get obvious bad faith actors in your face shouting nonsense very often, and when you do, you usually walk away from them too. It’s not helpful to engage with people who are actively working against cooling down.
b-b-but echo chamber!
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Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don’t know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.
I think it’s the general focus on driving engagement and feeding the algorithm.
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Most people here are (or were) still engaged on other social networks. The engagement seeking mindset is just so widespread, that people bring it with them to the fediverse where it makes no sense.
At least that’s my answer. Not saying it is the cause, but it sounds about right to me.
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Nuclear block plus a culture of not feeding the trolls means the only toxic accounts I’ve run across are just a day or two old. Block and move on. The experience can only be as negative as each user lets it be.
This has been my experience too. The community moderation tools on top of the tools available to moderate my own feed are leagues ahead of other platforms. Being able to temporarily block keywords feels really awesome in avoiding dumb shit that can blast through social media.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky?
Yes, but I think that’s temporary. When you have tens of millions of users, that’s inevitable. Right now a lot of people are on their honeymoon periods, but I already see sprouts of negative attitude.
Wow
