Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

It feels to me like the single biggest difference between Bluesky and Mastodon is that Bluesky wants to be a viable Twitter replacement and Mastodon doesn't

15 reposts92 likes

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Bluesky is supposed to support that eventually - that's what they mean by "federation" - but the fact that they haven't shipped that yet accidentally addresses a ton of the onboarding learning curve issues that Mastodon has

Phil Nash
@philna.sh

I’d argue that many of the people that made it here early were also capable of onboarding to Mastodon. Making the federation work for users when it is shipped will be a big challenge.

Juan
@handle.invalid

Agreed. Decentralization also the central differentiator promoted by Bluesky. If it offers the ideal server framework, and prevents tyrannical takeovers while driving content creation for the next two decades, it could become the YouTube of micro-blogging. Huge challenge with high risk.

Juan
@handle.invalid

Absolutely key. Onboarding new users by force-feeding them federative philosophy is catastrophic for retention. Bluesky solves that with super-simplicity and defaults. Verification through DNS is also so simple. Now, scale will be tested. Can they drive growth? This is where fails may happen.

M
@mick.bsky.social

Mastodon’s anti-algorithm stance made it hostile to casual users who wanted to test the waters. Ye olde reverse-chronological timeline is a formula for high churn in 2023.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

And honestly most of that comes down to timing: when Mastodon was created 7 years ago the world didn't NEED a Twitter replacement - Twitter was doing just fine! Bluesky is being born into a world where a replacement is very firmly needed

Jesse Vincent
@s.ly

mastodon was also originally populated by people who were driven off of Twitter before it was almost Twitter. The cultural norms that grew up there are decidedly more proscriptive, for better or for worse.