I've spent significant time on Bluesky and Mastodon for the last few months.
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So here's what I see as the barriers for both endeavors. Bsky's biggest problem is straight forward. It seems to operate under a model that requires centralized revenue. They gotta start making money at some point.
https://bsky.app/profile/polotek.bsky.social/post/3kkjqelc3ql2w -
When you have to make money, that means you're gonna start doing things that your users don't want so that you can make money. I don't know exactly what it'll look like. But it's inevitable. There's no other option.
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The upside is that we have experienced all of the horrors of profit-motivated social media. It's bad, but it's a known quantity at least. And we know that ultimately people will still show up. So it can work.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
The other problem that bsky has is more subtle. They took a bet on creating their own protocol. And I think that was a mistake. I don't think it will gain adoption, and I don't think they're going to succeed at becoming a truly distributed system.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
If bsky stays centralized, then it's just another upstart platform trying to compete for users in a market of huge players. For better or worse, Meta got threads to work. So along with Twitter, bsky is competing with two giants and not just one. It's not looking good tbh.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
With mastodon, the problems are completely different. It still has a revenue problem. But it's not centralized. Which means it can't depend on collecting large pools of capital. Some things can only happen quickly when you pay people lots of money to do it.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
Mastodon is missing lots of polish. The experience is slow and laggy. Not just on the official client. I mean everywhere. The UI on most clients is bad. Not ugly per se. But you can tell that it doesn't have a team of professional designers going that extra mile to make it great.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
Maybe most people don't know the difference. But they can feel the difference. We know that because we study it and measure it. Mastodon is not nice to use. Right now, people are getting unique value from it, so that is overcoming the UX problems. I don't think that will stay true.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
I think mastodon has to lean into getting weird. It has to really open up the ability for developers to add things that aren't allowed on centralized platforms. I'm not sure what that looks like. But I'm going to try to get closer to it myself.
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
Anyway, I'm gonna wind this thread down. Mastodon and bsky are the only two viable options for me currently. I won't be going back to twitter. I'm not joining another Meta-controlled platform. So threads is out. I don't do video, so Tik Tok is out. (I also believe Tik Tok is harmful)
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Marco Rogersreplied to Marco Rogers on last edited by
This is my call to action for this community. Right now it feels like mastodon is not moving fast enough to establish itself as a truly unique social media alternative. Instead it just feels like the worst version of the Twitter replacements. We need to invest in mechanisms that allow mastodon to grow new features that you can't get anywhere else. (And ideally solving the lag problem specifically. It's bad.)
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@polotek what about misskey or iceshrimp or akkoma or something else
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@breadguy what about them?
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@polotek misskey (and forks) has more features and polish than mastodon. akkoma doesn't have the visual polish but it has the features and customizability. i just wish people would give other fedi software more of a shot, mastodon is like 75% of the fedi userbase and is very basic as a microblogging platform
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@breadguy why do you wish that? Why does it matter to you which platform somebody else uses?