Everything was pointing Mastodon until Bluesky came. And guess what? Turns out the problem is and always has been corporations and centralized ownership.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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Mastodon has shit branding and I'm not afraid to say it.
In general, I'd say the fediverse as a whole has shit branding and is probably a bit too confusing and/or too much initial setup work for the average inertnet user.
But I'm glad it's like that, to a degree, because it helps lower the amount of people overwhelming places like here with all the people who would gladly allow the place to be overrun by ads and corporate astroturfing.
The barrier to entry acts as a filter. Which is crazy to me, because it’s still so easy to sign up and conceptualize, imo.
I guess it just goes to show how accustomed people have become to uncanny and frankly insane levels of convenience.
I remember the first time I logged in to Gmail without putting my password in — when all of a sudden the entire internet used cookies in lieu of credentials (is that how it works? I’m not qualified).
I can absolutely understand that it's difficult to conceptualise. For someone who already understands, the concept is dead simple.
But I still remember the confusion trying to join Mastodon all those years ago. You are shown a list of servers, huh? Never being introduced to the concept of federated social media, just being asked makes you feel like you don't belong because you don't understand what's happening.
Ok, so you search around and work out that it's across many servers. You now have to somehow pick a server with no frame of reference. Pick randomly and hope you don't pick the lemmdgrad equivalent (which is always high on the list on join-lemmy.com BTW). Then you go to join and you have to apply - oh, but what if they don't want me? How do they know who I am, why would they approve my application?
Each one of these things is a barrier to entry, they stack like swiss cheese so that very few people make it through.
Then there's the part where all these people have friends that could help them through it, but the friends never mention the fediverse to them because of the whole don't talk about thing. I am guilty of this.
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If I had a nickel for every time a corpo CEO who founded a microblogging social media platform stepped down to pursue even shittier corpo endeavors, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
The irony is that Doofenshmirtz is pretty good standin for an out of touch corpo CEO
Even Doofenshmirtz wouldn't stoop so low.
In one of the Season 5 episodes, Doof runs a gym as a front to get people to power his building, so he's not too far off...
How do you figure? That’s environmentalism at its finest
Doof was helping people get healthy, and using their healthy output so the power they generate didn't go to waste!
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Corporate owned entities will always enshitify.
Yup.
This is why I moved away from Gitea to Forgejo. Nothing wrong with Gitea. I just can't trust the corporate model anymore, especially not for something as critical as my code repos.
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Jay Graber is not CEO anymore, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy.
Valorizing CEOs is for idiots and suckers.
Ok it's not BlueSky as in the BlueSky social media website. It's another separate tool they're developing.
The title is very misleading.
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Use mastodon and the fediverse
Dude, not trying to throw shade at Mastodon, but where on Lemmy I get tons of interaction, on Pixelfed and Loops I get a solid amount and on Bluesky I get plenty in comments and some on my own posts...
I have had ZERO ANYTHING on Mastodon, and the content I post is more or less the same as the others. The app looks sleek and upload quality is better than the others, but it feels like being shadowbanned on Meta... Photos, memes, text, political, personal, you name it, nothing.
I make a point to use each of these apps once a day. No one is reciprocating anything on Mastodon. Again, it feels like being shadowbanned. I honestly hate it at this point. I'm trying to engage with those people and they're giving me nothing.
Maybe it's literally a technical issue, no joke. Or maybe I'm like the old lady in the "If my phone isn't broken then why don't my relatives call me?" story
EDIT: I'm surprised to hear I'm not alone. I thought my little rant would get downvoted. Well, dang! We need to fix Mastodon then!
I don't use Mastodon but sometimes I stumble upon other users on Mastodon. The vast majority of times, they scream out into the void. Thousands of posts, zero interaction.
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Bsky enhittified the day it was formed.
The problem: Twitter is being centrally controlled, by one large corporation which can be corrupted.
The solution: A new "company" with a "trusted board" instead of investors!
Bsky is slowly becoming twitter because someone who thinks like businessman can't comprehend running a project without a company and a "trusted board" behind it, with capital from elsewhere fueling the whole thing. Jack Dorsey probably had good intentions, but he's just too near sighted (or not the right person) to create a viable alternative disconnected from the business minded framework a true open decentralized twitter replacement needed.
It's basically just Twitter in the early days, way before the Musk takeover. It will follow the same path eventually, as all VC funded tech
People forget that Twitter turned to shit long before musk showed up. They were the ones who refused to enforce their own TOS for trump for years.
When Sam Altman buys Bluesky, you can expect the cycle to repeat itself.
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Oh damn. It's rotten all the way to the core.
Oh wait. I'm on mastodon. The correct platform to have migrated to
I get the same vibes from this woman I get from Sam Altman and Zuckerberg … just this cold, dead, vacant stare like there isn’t anything caring behind those eyes.
Ceo material
No surprise. Y'all are dumb if you think the point of all social media isn't to just make money.
Does that include Lemmy and Mastodon?
Both of those are federated options with no central company behind them. They have issues, but not because they have a corporate algorithm feeding their users.
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With Attie, users apparently enter what are essentially chatbot prompts. The app will process whatever the user types, find posts they might be into across Bluesky and other atpro-friendly networks, and use that to customize their feed and overall experience.
It sounds like a stupid app, but of everything going on, this is just not something I care about.
Does it come from the US?
Is it open source?
Are the people behind it overwhelmingly wealthy?
If (TRUE, FALSE, TRUE) 100% you should stay away from it.
I'd swap "open source: false" with "closed source: true" so the pattern is consistent.
I considered it but not closed source doesn't automatically mean open source so I preferred to be more rigorous.
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took a role as chief innovation officer of the social media platform.
Uhmmm.... chief what...?
As fake as it may sound
LOL exactly what I thought.
The bluesky rise kinda pissed me off. More so because all my artist friends that were on twitter went to bluesky instead of Mastodon when I told them about it as an alternative. everyone collectively decided to ignore a system that already existed and to the centralized thing again. Big suprise.
Bluesky was easier to sign up and less confusing to use. It had a much better mobile app. A lot of pro newsies came to Mastodon and were roundly ejected and abused, so they up and went to Blurdky instead. That was a major shooting your own foot moment for Mastodon because those newsies would have brought engaged audience. I saw people celebrating at Mastodon when news reporters up and quit. Idiotic. I hope the Lemmy community doesn't repeat that mistake.
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How it feels to be vindicated for not trusting/buying-in to a new fad
From the article:
New Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider told TechCrunch, “We’ve launched a lot of things inside Bluesky — Starter Packs and custom feeds, and all those kinds of things. This is a standalone product, and it’s the first one that’s built by Jay’s new team.” [emphasis added]
For those curious it sounds like the app is an ai powered discovery tool, where you tell it what kinda stuff you like and it tries to find stuff from across bsky to show you based on your interests you told it about
FWIW
Most of the people I know who moved to Bluesky instead of Mastodon specifically cited the ability to easily index/discover stuff from a single location as the reason.
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As fake as it may sound, chief innovation officer is a real job title
Oh wow, an AI feature that nobody asked for. Such innovation, much wow!
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I know this goes against the whole culture but we are going to do it anyway -Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, etc.
It's funny, I bailed when they started doing age checks. It made my life better
I knew it. Investors started pouring in, it was only a matter of time.
As long as it's open source and customizable, I don't see the problem with this.
It's not bad that we have algorithms to find content. I'm sorting the comments of this thread with an algorithm
The key is that I can choose which algorithm I want to sort by, that algorithm is open source, and I can write my own algorithm, if I want.
It seems this fediverse thing is the real innovation, not twitter clones.
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