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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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