Why do people go to Bluesky?

Julian Fietkau

@hongminhee Have you seen this by @kissane? https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt The post collects and categorizes reasons people have given for leaving Mastodon in the 2022-2023 timeframe.

A lot of it is actionable and I think some has already improved, or if not, is being worked on. But it is (and will continue to be) a marathon and not a sprint.

洪民憙 (Hong Minhee)

When I was talking to my wife (@tokolovesme), who still primarily uses X, about this topic, she said that she feels isolated whenever she uses Mastodon. In particular, when you're on a low-population server, you can't easily search for other people's posts, you can't see all the replies to the posts that flow in, and you actually see far fewer favorites and reposts. All of this makes the fediverse feel less lively.

洪民憙 (Hong Minhee)

The loss of replies, favorites, etc. when crossing server boundaries, as well as the search issues, seems like something that should be fixed as soon as possible…

Julian Fietkau

@hongminhee There is a pull request for reply synchronization pending review for Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/32615

This is one of the things I was thinking of under the umbrella of "being worked on". I hope it can bear fruit in a timely fashion.

And for search, if I were in charge I might have suggested real P2P search (KaZaA did it in 2000, why can't we?), but the Mastodon project is taking a different approach: https://www.fediscovery.org

Mark Malstrom

@hongminhee I can only speak to my own experience and what I’ve heard from others, but I think it’s a lot of different factors:

• People like the features AT enabled over AP, like global search of the network and algorithmic timelines
• The people developing the app and the network are very active and excited to answer everyone’s questions
• The default apps are pretty good and extremely hackable for web devs

Mark Malstrom

@hongminhee
• There are lots of good JavaScript libraries available for hacking on any part of the AT stack (making it so easy to create a client that I got one up and running in a single weekend)
• The JavaScript development community (who never really made it over from Twitter) is finally posting somewhere other than Twitter and they’ve chosen Bluesky (I think for a lot of the reasons mentioned above)

Mark Malstrom

@hongminhee
• The Apple development community already largely migrated to Mastodon very soon after Elon Musk took over Twitter, so the Apple devs are more likely to stay here because their community is here

Chee Aun 🤔

@hongminhee IMO, that's still a very specific use-case tho'.

Social media is tough because it caters for many different use-cases on a single UI — everyone uses it differently, thus it's a hard UX problem.

silverpill

@hongminhee

conversation containers by @mikedev solve that problem. With this mechanism in place not only replies are synchronized, but also reactions and edits - everything that happens in a conversation.
It also enables reply controls, private groups and (better) followers-only posts.

NIGHTEͶ

@hongminhee I’m super happy you brought up the subject, it was super interesting to see the reasons that where brought up

Related to the feeling of being isolated, I think a downside for a lot of people is actually the lack of algorithm; having to curate your feed yourself to get relevant posts is kinda hard especially if your interests are niche (or even on a less popular timezone since everything is chronological), and the limited search doesn’t help on top of that, like you rightfully pointed out

I would love to see more fediverse project experiment with recommendation and algorithm, maybe optional like Bluesky does

There is lot of hate for algorithms on Fedi (a lot of them justified), but without them making the fediverse compete with VC funded social media for a broad demographic is like making a natural bodybuilder compete with a steroid user

Thank you once again for starting this thread!

David Raygoza Gómez

@hongminhee here I have the explanation

David Raygoza Gómez (@[email protected])

Attached: 2 images @[email protected] I have a very blunt answer to what BlueSky users *interact* Here is an example, this are from an artist who is posting in both BlueSky and Mastodon at the same time, he is not a big famous artist but just look at the number of likes and boosts. In the same time he got 49 likes and 9 boosts on BlueSky And 1 like and 1 boost on Mastodon You can yell that numbers don't matter all you want, they do And as long we are a void being yell, we will keep loosing users

me.dm by Medium.com (me.dm)

Julian Fietkau

@hashraydamon @hongminhee Hmm, gonna note respectfully that this smells a bit like anecdata. A few artists I know have posted about experiencing the same thing, but in reverse: they post in both places, but say they prefer Mastodon because people here actually interact with their posts. I think it depends a lot on how they themselves engage with each community.

Meanwhile here's an actual empirical analysis of how people engage with posts on Bluesky: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113366251723015524

Julian Fietkau

@hashraydamon @hongminhee All that said, you're correct that interacting with and sharing posts we like is very important here. I sometimes have to remind myself not to become too passive while scrolling and I like seeing the occasional "you are the algorithm here" reminder post.