The thing I love about this post and all its replies, is the stark difference in replies in answer to Brent's very reasonable question.

mekka okereke :verified:

Some folks:
* It's the starter packs / easier onboarding!

Other folks:
[I'll let you read those replies]

Brent Toderian (@[email protected])

I’m surprised that while my Bluesky account has grown by 8000 followers — DOUBLED to 16k+ — in just the last week since the election, my Mastodon count hasn’t changed at all. Is Mastodon not seen as an alternative to Twitter? Or is my account hard to find for those not following me? Honestly curious.

Mastodon (mastodon.online)

If you think it's the starter packs / easier onboarding, then that leads you to want easier onboarding for Mastodon

If you think it's a character flaw or moral failing in people that choose BlueSky, that leads to doing nothing‍️

mekka okereke :verified:

I love BlueSky, mainly because it's now our best bet at Twitter not being as influential in the US midterm elections (that are coming up sooner than we think).

I like to brag and boast when I am right about a call, so it's only fair to admit when I'm wrong: I really thought Mastodon would get it together on the onboarding and trust and safety front.

In fairness, Mastodon is getting it together... but just far too slowly to matter. A slow "yes" is often the same outcome as a "no."‍️

Eris Renée

@mekkaokereke Yeah I'm on there as well as here, and I like a lot of aspects of bluesky, like the easier onboarding, moderation lists, labelers, quotes, etc, but I *much* prefer fedi/activitypub's model compared to bluesky's big central service.

Of course i dislike that bluesky isn't a nonprofit, is funded by a crypto group, and hasn't yet handed off atproto to a nonprofit or standards org, but that's nerd stuff.

Most people care about ease-of-use, feeling safe, finding their friends, and literally nothing about the protocol or the decentralization or anything like that. Bluesky is more twitter-y than fedi ever was, and i think that's what most folks are looking for right now.

Jürgen Hubert

@mekkaokereke Google+ had something similar with shareable Circles, which did a _lot_ for discovering interesting users.

I miss Google+. Though its abandonment and the Enshittification of Twitter made me extremely leery of trusting any corporate-based social media system ever again.

I sure do hope Mastodon - or some other #ActivityPub - based system - will eventually have all the features to be truly competitive.

Eris Renée

@mekkaokereke Just to be clear: i'm very critical of a lot of aspects of bluesky, and it frustrates me to no end that so many people don't see or don't care about the red flags I see with it, but there are still a lot of things we can learn from them from a UX and moderation standpoint.

I also don't think fedi needs to "win" in a competition here. It's not a company that needs to show constant growth. Bluesky is a VC-funded for-profit corporation, of course they're going to grow faster and have more resources to develop nice UX. We should steal some of that nice UX though.

I much prefer the sense of community here. Bluesky feels a lot more influencer-heavy imo.

Lars Ivar

@juergen_hubert I agrre on G+! Being engaged there led to (for me at least) absurdly many real world effects through the people I got to know there. I even had waffles with you Jürgen in a coffee shop here in Trondheim

@mekkaokereke

Jürgen Hubert

@larsivi @mekkaokereke Those were the days!

And back in 2013 I made a friend there - a black woman from South Africa who emigrated to Germany - who is still one of my best friends today.

Google+ was far more international than Mastodon is.

Emelia 👸🏻

@mekkaokereke yeah, we're constantly fighting the fact that a lot of the trust & safety aspects in both Mastodon and ActivityPub in general were left languishing for so long.

Hopefully the new ActivityPub Trust & Safety Taskforce can make some forward improvements here through reports & recommendations.

Though funding for work is definitely also a factor here, it's obviously possible to do more faster with a budget of $30+ Million vs $600k/year

Oblomov

@Eris @mekkaokereke Mastodon has a lot of room for improvements UX wise (and there's a lot of effort that is going underway even though it's, shall we say, not as considered as it should by those with merge rights), but I'm skeptical about how much BS can be an inspiration for those improvements. How much of the “UX improvements” in BS are a direct consequence of it being a centralized system above anything else? (One example for all: you don't need to choose a server because there's only one.)

Eris Renée

@oblomov I’m on my phone now so i’m sorry for my typing.

the lists are a big one. starter pack lists make it very easy to find people you might want to follow, and are more intuitive than our hashtag introduction system, though bluesky’s implementation means anyone can add anyone to a list so they’re also used for harassment - requiring approval is probably the move here.

the moderation lists to auto-mute/block folks are pretty cool too, and i think it could work alongside our per-instance moderation with some thought.

labels are neat, although i definitely expect they’ll be misused by bad actors there. probably need some moderation around them. kinda gotta see how that one shakes out.

Those are the things that scream out to me right now. All this shit takes development time and a lot of thought, though. They have waaay more funding than any fedi project i know of.

Christian Kent

@juergen_hubert @larsivi @mekkaokereke Than *which* Mastodon? Some of the servers? The entire federation? I don’t really understand the point you’re making — and without clarification it might imply something else.

Oblomov

@Eris @mekkaokereke oh yes the ideas are nice, but the problem is, nice ideas have the tendency of not scaling that nicely when decentralization is involved. Consider for example the starter lists idea: where does the server fetch them from to present them to the user? Who manages addition and removal of entries from the list? How do changes to it propagate?
We already have something like that for the “reference blocklist”, and even that essentially relies on a centralized service (Oliphant) 1/2

Oblomov

@Eris @mekkaokereke
and that's before even getting into how much of a social problem these are *before* being technical problems. And they are a social problem because of federation (simplifying: “who federates with whom”, which maps also to “who takes recommendation from whom”), but also because of the social interactions involved in the software development itself (there has been recent discussions you probably have come across about how certain thought-out PRs are being disregarded).

2/2

Eris Renée

@oblomov @mekkaokereke Starter lists can be user generated just like they are there. You follow them from your server, same way we follow users currently, and that causes you to automatically follow everyone on the list at that moment.

Changes could federate via activitypub. Some protections should be in place to not allow users to add folks with protected accounts or discovery off, and adding someone to a list could send an approval request to them on the server they live on. Bluesky doesn’t have this, but probably should.

Going the extra mile for usability, once someone on your server follows a list, maybe a list of popular lists that federate with your server could be shown somewhere during onboarding. Maybe automatically, or approved by server admins/moderators, depending on the server’s vibe. Otherwise they can be manually shared like they are on bsky.

Just an idea on how it could work, but i totally think it could work. It’d be a lot of effort, and idk if the mastodon project has the resources to think about this right now, but yeah.

Oblomov

@Eris @mekkaokereke
so one way this could be implemented is that in addition to my “private” lists that I use to manage my follows, I could have public lists, and anyone browsing my profile could see them and one-click add its members to their follows, or block them (for a block list)? (This doesn't solve the problem of users having to find *me* in the first place, but it would help past that point.)

I guess changes to these lists could come through federation similar to follow requests.

Oblomov

@Eris @mekkaokereke (For the changes, I mean something like: a user can ask to be added to a public list in a similar way to how they can ask to follow someone with a locked profile, and similar they could ask to be removed from a list; some of these action could be automatic, but with care: for example, you can remove yourself from a starter list, but not from a public block list)

Eris Renée

@oblomov yeah that’s basically all bluesky’s lists are, from what i can tell. i think for public shareable lists, it needs to be opt-in not opt-out. Too easy to be used for harassment otherwise.

block lists work similarly. as do labels. i believe people can request to be taken off, but that’s up to whoever manages the list.

moderation services would be quite a bit more complicated, idk about that. one instinctual thought i had was to be able to follow another server’s moderation decisions on an account level, but thinking about it for an extra few seconds, that’d get real hairy real quick. but maybe we could take some ideas there? i don’t know.

Jürgen Hubert

@ckent @larsivi @mekkaokereke Mastodon in its entirety.

It's heavily populated by Europeans and North Americans, and _white_ Europeans and North Americans at that. It's hard to find a lot of people outside of that bubble.

Anders Norén

@mekkaokereke There is also all these conservative people who think that the present state of Mastodon is a feature and that any changes will lead to deterioration (a.k.a. more users).

AJ Sadauskas

@mekkaokereke Sadly, I get the impression that the window of opportunity for Mastodon to be the great Twitter replacement might have closed.

It's just so quiet in here right now, especially compared with BlueSky.

That might change over time?

I think what a lot of people wanted was just a better moderated Twitter. And that's something Mastodon ultimately failed to deliver, particularly with the default apps.

I think perhaps it's time to focus on Mastodon better at being its own thing. A place for slower, more thoughtful, longer form conversations.

And to keep chipping away at the moderation and other issues that have held it back.

I certainly think there's merit in better federation between the Fedi and BlueSky.

But these are just a few disjointed thoughts...