Yup, I’m calling it.
bsky will prevail where Mastodon failed. The recent migration triggered the critical mass of Chaos Muppet Energy that Masto’s culture works so hard to extinguish
Like a climactic moment in a Zelda game where the accumulation of artifacts and switches pulled channels mystical energy.
I will see you over there!
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What threw it over the top for me was catching wind of a developing news event in real time—the Nazi party at MSG
with the blend of straight facts, analysis and jokes we used to get from Twitter
A range of voices broad enough there to really deliver. How exciting
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update two weeks later:
Yup. Bsky is where it’s at. It feels like Twitter used to feel, the vibes are positive, the voices are diverse, it’s easy to get the kind of content you need
Moreover, the product quality gap compared to Masto is yawning ever wider, with user-made feed algorithms, block lists, and starter packs
Whatever advantages Masto had from its early lead are exhausted, and as it relates to time and attention, I will not be betting on its success
https://hachyderm.io/@danilo/113367189576147761
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I do hope you will consider joining bluesky, as not all of my favorites have made the migration yet
If you abandoned it previously, as I did, give it another look. Journalists and scientists in particular are moving over, providing an insightful foundation for discussion and enriching the quality of feeds
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My favorite anecdote on the superiority of its product design culture:
For years Masto has avoided quote posts, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in a conversation that goes in circles, to the detriment of making things people want
Bsky shipped a thing where you can just detach yourself from any quoting post you feel is acting in bad faith, or otherwise brings you attention you don’t want
Sorry, man, they got the juice
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Again, the juice.
Bsky is the number one free iOS app in the US right now.
Mastodon is the 184th most popular app in the social media chart. Here are some apps that rank ahead of Mastodon on that chart:
Masto’s leadership fucked the dog here.
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Reasonable people can disagree about the growth and funding strategies for a social media platform.
But Mastodon being less popular than a superfluous companion app for a game publisher no one likes is just poor stewardship.
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tired: bluesky will be enshittified by financial incentives
wired: mastodon is already enshittified by poor management
inspired: bsky is adding a million users a day and now tops the Android list as well
User-built algorithms, a chronological timeline, a great blend of safety and product features
Plus a much more diverse slate of conversation topics and contributors
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Bluesky now growing at a rate of 12-13 users per second
So why am I beating this drum?
Mastodon’s failure to capture Twitter’s collapse is instructive as a once-in-a-generation cautionary tale
Product design matters, protocol ideology is not enough, and disliking capitalism is not an exemption from economics
You will read a lot of copium about the fediverse still being viable, but it is now the smaller development target. That has consequences.
https://bcounter.nat.vg
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And I think the short version is this:
A professional team of 20 people, fully funded and paid a proper full-time wage, is an objectively more effective approach to building the future than one grumpy bottleneck guy making $60k a year and a bunch of other people looking on with wishful thinking
Disliking venture capital is NOT ENOUGH. You have to figure out a different model that still can fund enough deep, sustained, collaborative work to build a thing people want
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This is the mastodon energy in a nutshell, yup
“Love this crummy platform or get lost” is exactly how this happened
The final nail in the coffin here will be the culture.
https://freeradical.zone/@alltherum/113488808057395557
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But I think the thing that REALLY sticks in my craw is:
and
are mutually incompatible positions. If the place is really that bad it must be destroyed. And the way you do that is by displacing it in its niche
Building the Twitter killer is a moral imperative.
Instead the dominant Masto vibe is “Elon is terrible therefore let’s build a culturally marginal alternative with bad financials”
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This is kind of a microcosm of Masto Brain:
Bluesky has optimized safety and social features first ahead of client performance—eg reply gating, blocks that completely deny trolls access to your post’s audience, starter packs to bootstrap your social graph
while deferring client performance
An exercise for the reader to project whether Masto successfully applies these platform fundamentals before Bluesky invests in the nuts and bolts of client performance
https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/113492377287939587
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“I cannot BELIEVE Oprah is recommending Twitter on her show. It’s a monolithic ruby application that relies a on a SINGLE MySQL database. why isn’t she talking about RSS and showing people how an XML feed is structured”
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Feel how you need to feel about it, user experience eats ideology and sound architecture for breakfast
Cry yourself to sleep or build a strategy that accounts for this. That’s the spectrum of options here
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Damn, @marcprecipice provides a FOURTEEN YEAR OLD allegory to Masto’s current moment in a post-mortem of the company he founded, Wesabe
They ultimately lost the Web 2.0 personal finance war to Mint, and Marc’s clear-eyed analysis on why it happened—user experience—rhymes with the divergence between Bluesky and Mastodon
https://xoxo.zone/@marcprecipice/113500380537776062
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I am Strident Posting in this thread but let me be super clear:
While I think Masto has absolutely lost the plot, it would be the height of ingraciousness not to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts of the Hachyderm crew
They have done the impossible for years since the first Twitter exodus, providing high-uptime service and ongoing governance. So much work.
It’s a thankless job built on a courageous idealism, and I will always be so impressed and grateful for their efforts.
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MastoCulture values the overall victory of mass adoption less than it does maintaining ideological purity and insularity. “I don’t care if Masto gets popular” is a posture that cedes all leverage to shape the future of social software.
Consider:
Mastodon became a one-way dumping ground for Threads posts
While Bluesky’s explosive growth is forcing Threads to change its product to remain competitive
If you can’t scare Zuckerberg, you’re not really in the game tbh
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/25/24305690/threads-default-following-feed-test
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@danilo you're not wrong.
That said, I see a lot more people on bsky getting very hung up on mastodon, than the other way around.
As an aside, "screwed the pooch" is how I would typically phrase that particular sentiment.
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@danilo is the (huge) beef you're having about the official app, or about the service? Just curious.
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@danilo I mean the iOS App.
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@danilo I just think that having a crypto enshittifier on the board is gonna end badly. Idk how we reconcile that with Masto, I get the complaints.
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@danilo But it definitely worries me that people suggest Bluesky has an escape hatch when it does not. Someone drew "escape hatch here" on a postit note and left that in a blank spot in the atproto spec. To actually replicate bluesky wouldn't just be a matter of having the Capex, there is engine engineering precedent for the process.
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@Elucidating definitely one of those worry-about-it-tomorrow things for me, now that we can confirm mastodon's dead-end trajectory
For the time being, just grateful to have a working real time consensus and news breaking mechanism again
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@danilo @Elucidating I know they’re busy but I really hope the fix the did:plc thing soon, just so we can stop having to talk about the caveat.
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@Elucidating @danilo
Yeah, the crypto guy with the Bannon ties is enough to give me strong "Lucy holding the football" vibes.
I'm willing to put up with a less addictive environment to not go down that road again.
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@danilo
I think maintaining a presence on both platforms is healthy; where one puts their primary efforts depends on what you're prioritizing.
For me fedi is the primary, but I'm happy to treat BlueSky as a secondary and remain open-ended about whether it will "end badly" or whether they manage to stay true to their commitment to build a public benefit organization.
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@danilo
I don't think we need adversarial rhetoric about either project at this point - they can be friends :).
At the same time, we should jointly help folks get off X and promote the options that make sense to us.
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@danilo yep. The common person sure is a dumbass
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@danilo ask America how it knows
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@danilo It's not clear to me what you're hoping to accomplish with this, anymore
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@jenniferplusplus a eulogy, mostly
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@danilo If there's anything to eulogize, it's a future that didn't happen. Mastodon didn't die. It's here right now, and that dissonance is giving weirdly antagonistic energy.
edit: I don't know why this post is getting attention. But, for the record: Danilo is right. I just think this anger and blame is being directed to the wrong audience. Overwhelmingly, his followers (of which I am one), were not the cause of the problem he identified.
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@jenniferplusplus oh the antagonism is REAL:
I think it’s an enormous fuckup and I openly blame the deeply homogenous, Torvalds-y culture and the project leadership
At core I believed in the premise completely and I loathe the coalition of dipshits who absolutely derailed this into stagnation. It did not have to go this way
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@danilo So, the thing is, not everyone has given up on that promising future. It's fine to leave, but maybe don't smash up the place on the way out, if that future is still something you want.
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@jenniferplusplus what I want is a real-time consensus and news-breaking engine; I have determined that Mastodon will not meet this need, and the goal is best served by making the case to what reach I have to try the other thing, maximizing the chance of that goal being met
If mastodon is really so brittle that 2k audience reach and a sharp tut-tutting can really "smash it up," as you say, I am understating my own case dramatically!
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@danilo "mastodon" for virtually any definition of that word, is going to go on without you and not even notice. But you're not talking to "mastodon" here. You're talking to those 2k.
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@jenniferplusplus I acknowledge the scolding
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@danilo @jenniferplusplus it's like they say, "whenever anyone criticizes any aspect of the mastodon-flavored fediverse, they can expect a flood of pushback".
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@dave @danilo Just so there's no ambiguity: I agree with Danilo's analysis and conclusion. He seems to be angry, and I share that anger.
This conversation is me trying to let him know that I think he's directing that anger in a really counterproductive way.
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@jenniferplusplus @dave @danilo assuming it's possible to modify the dynamics that undergird the technical shortfalls and make up the culture, how's it counterproductive to perpetuate a discourse that seeks to create the conditions for change?
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@oscarjiminy @jenniferplusplus @dave @danilo
Have you heard the term “preaching to the choir“?
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@mcepl @jenniferplusplus @dave @danilo mastodon's a monolith huh?
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@jenniferplusplus @dave @danilo thanks for the interesting conversation. I am rather enjoying Mastodon, and hopefully there is space for more than one microblogging platform. I am also reducing my diet of social media, so a less hectic pace is not necessarily a bug for me. I acknowledge that different people will look for different things.
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@jenniferplusplus @dave @danilo The critic about Mastodons tech and leadership are directed at the wrong audience.
But the complaint about the culture here is where it belongs: shouted out to the general public.
The toxic hatred for anything that's not the fediverse (or some special flair of fediverse even) of some here is astounding.
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@jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io @danilo@hachyderm.io
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@danilo @jenniferplusplus
So why are you here?
Your opinions are opinions, I don't think they're particularly valid but I wonder why you post so much about it.
I'm not going to wax lyrical about the Fediverse, or the multiplicity of platforms but when it comes down to it no single user can tell the difference in how many other users there are on any social platform once it gains traction. Regardless of network.
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@danilo Mastodon is just not that user hostile, dude.
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@danilo peddle AI elsewhere
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@danilo what’s you’re blue sky name thing?
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@danilo the real absolute core of so much of this is that computer people do not listen to or respect designers, and designers by and large are not beholden to a “do no harm” code of ethics. Add the obvious “business/market pressures” and almost no outcome will be surprising with an even basic understanding of these dynamics.
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@danilo @marcprecipice — It's not just Mastodon. It's implementing ActivityPub too. It's just plain complicated. I’ll report back my findings on atproto, but one of the things about the web was that HTML and CSS was easy. I'm not saying everything should be easy, but at the very least, documentation should be consistent and helpful.
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@danilo Here's my take, which you didn't ask for, but it's here anyway:
Mastodon's going to putter along for the communities that are supported by it. For them it's the right thing. Great!
If ActivityPub / the Fediverse is going to be the thing for a wider audience, it needs another native platform that has at least the user experience / community development energy that Bluesky has demonstrated. Threads is not that platform, although it will help with numbers.
Bluesky is doing so much right.
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@ben please assume your takes have an open invitation
This sounds about right to me!
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@danilo Further: I like the co-operative community model of the Fediverse and want it to succeed. (This is not zero sum: Bluesky can succeed too!)
But your example about quote posts is spot on. Conservatism is not the answer. Find a way around the problem and build something new that's user-first and engaging.
Bluesky's starter packs are genuinely new. The quote post detaching is genuinely new. The DID custom domain thing is cool. We could have that kind of innovation here too.
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@danilo I actually think this is more to do with money than anything. $36M buys you a lot - including designers and a directed product vision. It's really hard to do that on a low budget, and I don't know of a grassroots open source project that's ever managed it.
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@danilo I would go so far as to say:
Arguments about how bad the other option is don't win people over.
Theoretical ideology doesn't win people over.
The only thing that wins people over is a compelling, concrete prospect that improves their lives right now.
There may, uh, be other analogies for this in the world around us right now that we also badly need to learn from.
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@ben @danilo Drupal comes to mind as a brilliant, complex, user-focused open-source project. But then Wordpress became more popular. I wonder if any parallels or lessons can be drawn there?
And I agree with your point - money makes a huge difference, though values and priorities do too. Lacking money makes values and prioritisation more keenly felt, as you can't follow through on nearly as many of them.
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@philbetts @danilo Yeah. I mean, taste and user-centered values matter too, and you can have those for free.
It's never about having the most technically advanced (or most customizable) solution. It's about having the experience that most closely matches peoples' actual needs - and even then, you're lost without a really solid go-to-market strategy and initial focus. That's the WordPress lesson, and the same story has been told probably hundreds of times with different projects / products.
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@philbetts @danilo None of this is to downplay what everyone at Mastodon has achieved. What they've done from a standing start is actually incredible.
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@ben Yeah, having worked at Twitter and started a few companies, that's basically my take. Do I have my gripes? Sure. Do I think there's a lot of justice in many other people's gripes? Definitely. But I also know that where Mastodon has some developer's spare time, Twitter had full time, cross-functional teams of well-paid, experienced professionals. Any fair comparison needs to account for that. And include the fact that Bluesky is for now grossly unsustainable. (Which, yes, many users don't care about; they can just move on again when it enshittifies or dies. But I think that matters a lot for the people doing the work.)
@danilo
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@danilo not that I disagree with you on this or that, but if you prefer Bsky then… just leave?
Or are you waiting for people to tap your back first?
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@danilo — I’ve been mulling this kind of thought process lately. “Winning the game” vs “wishing the rules were different”. You kinda have to win if you want to change the rules. In this case, of course, there could be several games, and several definitions of winning, but “not playing that game because I don’t like the rules” is a thing. Not pretty, but there all the same.
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@paulca right
This is the nut of my frustration for the last two years
You win by winning, not by losing, and as tautological as this observation is, it’s apparently absent from the mastodon partisan’s calculus
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@paulca also what is going on with these emdashes
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
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@danilo — Oh I picked up that habit early in Twitter days. I think from @gruber
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