Maybe I’ve turned too soft and pragmatic, but I think that millions of people finally leave Twitter and don’t end up on Threads is a good thing. I wanted the Fediverse “to win” for a long time. I think the crypto VC money behind Bluesky is a huge red flag and will very like backfire. But I also think that it’s not in my control what people prefer and there are valid reasons why they prefer Bluesky, no matter if we like it or not.
Most important: this does not invalidate the Fediverse. There’s no such thing as winning and I feel bad for my own past thoughts. The only thing that matters is that we finally get away from algo based social media that collectively fries our brains. Bluesky feels pretty healthy right now despite the questionable background. Be happy that lots of people find a healthier place in really dark times.
Maybe it will explode in a year from now. But then it still served as a digital safe space for a while. Maybe the company behind it really has a good plan to make themselves irrelevant in the future - even better! But in the meantime it would really help to get inspired a bit by the good stuff over there.
Moderation tools are better. The default app is better. The starter packs are great. The custom feeds are a nice idea. Mastodon has solved so many hard problems that Bluesky still has to solve. Decentralization is a beast and most people on Bluesky don’t understand that their platform has skipped the truly hard parts so far. But Mastodon
really needs to focus on the UX issues.
I mean, I absolutely love it here. I feel more at home here than I do over there. But I only do because I use third-party apps like @ivory and @elk I think it would be really good if the Mastodon team could acknowledge that their strength is in the technical side but not on the UX side. I don’t think there’s anything wrong about that.
The UX parts are also not about selling out more or about becoming more mainstream or whatever. It’s about being more approachable and accessible for more people. Most of the climate scientists that I follow turned up over here first and now migrated to Bluesky and that really hurts. But I can’t blame them. They just found better, faster ways there to organize.
One last thought. Mastodon is known for the bad vibes and the reply guys and I honestly believe that's just an excuse to get off of here again. It all exists here in various forms and it's a problem, but it also exists on Bluesky. I've had Nazis and weird reply guys and bots and all of that. It's still social media.
But Bluesky offers better ways to connect with your bubble and block the assholes. There's a faster road to a cosy world than there is here and that's also UX design.
I've managed to build a very cosy home for me here and the conversations have been 95% positive in the last two years. But it took a lot of work.
@bastianallgeier I 100% agree with this One thing to keep in mind here: UX – in this case – is also about the experience of an organisation when creating their custom instance. This is important because if organisations can provide their teams with their own platform easily, they will. If it's a hurdle, they will not. It has to be something an employee can install over a lunch break and say: "Look, I've quickly created an Mastodon instance for us."
@nilshoerrmann I totally agree. That would have been a huge door-opener. There are a couple hosting services now that make this possible, but it still all feels very technical and risky to a certain extend.
@bastianallgeier Yeah, it's also a problem if "hosting service" is actually that guy Steve from Tennessee who set up a service that might or might not exist next year ;) It needs to be professional at a business level.
@bastianallgeier It would be huge if – for instance – one of the big hosting providers in Germany would offer custom Mastondon instances with their business plans. That would make it easy for businesses who don't manage their own servers to get an instance running easily ("Oh, yes, I've heard of Mastodon, it's actually included in our hosting plan!").
@nilshoerrmann @bastianallgeier the browser company #Vivaldi has vivaldi.net services: anyone with a vivaldi.net account, so anyone with a vivaldi.net email address, also gets a Mastodon account when they connect to their social.vivaldi.net instance
@bastianallgeier It definitely takes a lot of effort to create the kind of Mastodon, or Fediverse, experience you want, I absolutely agree. It's still very niche, but the signal v noise ratio is still a lot better here.
I would argue that Mastodon never was and should never aspire to be a drop-in replacement for Twitter et al. I get a lot of value from it precisely because it's not the biggest, "loudest" platform.
@bastianallgeier I truly enjoy seeing many familiar faces who never joined the Fediverse back on Bluesky, but much of it feels a lot like broadcasting, at least to me right now (which is what I never liked about Twitter).
@bastianallgeier I absolutely agree with you. And that's also the reason why I usually don't use open source software. I can't work with tools that look horrible. There are good programmers at work, but few to none who can build intuitive, pretty UIs.
So from me too: Thank you @ivory for this nice app that I can use on all my Apple devices.
Very good points. I think in addition that the experience of having migrated services may help the next time migration is necessary. Maybe the exodus when the skies darken comes faster than it did when the bird went full nazi.