Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
Why is that?
From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation
Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.
Problem is there’s no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there’s not as much monetization of the users to fund it.
I’m perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there’s a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can’t run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.
Edit: I didn’t realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don’t think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.
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Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.
The Technology Connections guy (Alec) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:
I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.
It is. Autocorrect and bad proofreading. Thanks, fixed.
Jah, cool! Yeah there’s a whole other set of problems for people with real followings… Not good
Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.
On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.
I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don’t really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.
I do kind of like how it makes mastodon feel smaller since I cannot interact with or post quote replies, unlike Tumblr or Twitter. Those sometimes accrue millions of interactions. But it is a choice that will keep Mastodon small
Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.
The average user is unfortunately, still to this day, an idiot.
Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.
And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.
Mastodon does not have as many arbitrary restrictions for one.