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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you can set your clock by how reflexively mastodon will tell you that bsky will, some day, inevitably, ~enshittify~
Which is a dodge on the fact that mastodon is already ~enshittified~ through several paths that disqualify it from the sort of adoption that would give it power to shape the future of the web for good, eg:
https://toolsforthought.social/@billseitz/113545265144959068
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In other words:
“Someday it will be bad, so instead use the worse product today” is not a viable rhetorical OR growth strategy
Similarly, wild that scolding people out of using Twitter for years didn’t work at all, but building a better product did
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This is wild
I had no idea the Masto Purity Dork Cops blacklisted Hachyderm—as Dave says among the best citizens of the Fediverse—because they wouldn’t roll with with banning Threads
So on top of all the other shit, the Mastodon user must somehow navigate the stupidest internecine politics in internet history
How are you supposed to keep UP with that?
https://alvarado.social/@dave/113545732397167162
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I am positively RADICALIZED by this information
I have been posting this thread, frustrated though I am, as medicine. I think the internet is better off if Mastodon somehow figures its shit out, and that means socializing the diagnosis of its illness
But this is so positively STUPID, while fully baked into the design of the system, that I think the whole thing may be too dumb to be saved
Culture eats strategy—and protocols—for breakfast
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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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@paulca @danilo I love me some em-dashes, but I don't think I ever used them at the start of replies? Maybe in the prehistoric days when “@replies" on Twitter were just a user convention, not an actual feature Twitter supported in any way?
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@gruber @danilo — I might be misremembering that it was you, but I always quite liked the aesthetic so I just stuck with it!
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@danilo — I do think “what is the game?” is an important question, because in many ways, Mastodon is winning a different game (very much not the “alternative to Twitter for everyone else” game), and I think that’s ok! But yeah, it’s hard to know sometimes.
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@paulca I’m not even sure it’s winning whatever circumscribed version of the game it’s chosen to play
Every time it sees a surge of new users, it fails to retain them, and usage overall is declining rather than increasing
It didn’t even get a Twitter surge this time around, save a small blip. All that energy went into bsky instead
https://mastodon-analytics.com
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@danilo nailed it
also like why the instant assumption that bsky will inevitably sell out its users — as if alternate futures are literally impossible. giving up preemptively.
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@jacob right, there’s a certain motivated reasoning to it that’s really thin
“I will not strategize because history will justify me” is not really how you play a game with stakes this high
If it’s really the whole future of the web in the balance, maybe we should figure out how to win?
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@danilo it’s also, like, where else does this logic make sense? Do you also avoid watching a movie because some day it might have a sequel that sucks? Skip your fifth anniversary because by the tenth you might be over it? Avoid eating a slice of pie because the others will eventually spoil? It’s so weird to give up on something because it might someday be bad and thus totally eschew any power you might have to affect the outcome.
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@jacob and ironically this is the place where I am MOST SYMPATHETIC to the mastodon partisan
Yes, handing social power to corporations is almost always going to be a devil’s agreement
so if you’ve decided you want to fight that power, you fight it by being great, by being strategic, not be being a fucking scold lmaooooooo
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@jacob @danilo It's not inevitable, but very likely. By now we've seen often enough that if something can be enshitified, it will eventually be.
But the thorn in this whole discussion is that the average user doesn't care about the merits or longevity of any particular solution. The average user doesn't even care about the "best product", not as a deciding factor for a social platform. They care about where their friends and the people they look up to are.
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@jacob @danilo And this is why Threads and Bluesky have so much momentum, especially when compared to Mastodon. They've been more welcoming to users of all backgrounds, more appealing to celebrities, including not (selectively) complicating or discriminating.
As much as I want the Fediverse to win, it's clear that ideals and politics are getting in the way of greater adoption, which will continue to render it irrelevant. No amount of apologism will make up for coming short on its potential.
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@danilo this stuff is the reason we talk so much about the distressing feudalism of fedi's model, yeah. we can't eliminate the fact that the modern world has multiple layers of political deception around social venues (that's true everywhere; there are entire platforms that we personally see as just traps for trans people), but we can and should work to minimize the consequences of making mistakes
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@danilo it's particularly distressing that the time at which people have to do the highest-stakes assessment of the political factors, choosing their very first server, is also the time when they're least equipped to do so
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@ireneista bingo
This is it
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@danilo thanks. that last part is not our original observation, for the record, it grew out of discussions among friends
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@danilo @ireneista I wonder if the fix isn't as simple as embracing mastodon.social as the defacto starting instance for most people unaware of the intricacies of different instances (like Gmail is for email) and making it dead simple to migrate everything somewhere else at any time (unlike Gmail).
Regardless of it being as simple as this, it's rather late.
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@goncalossilva @danilo mm. that sounds like a self defeating strategy to us.
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@goncalossilva @danilo like, yes that works well for email, if there being five companies in the world which decide who can send email counts as working
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@ireneista @danilo Email was one example... But this "default instance" approach also seems to be working for Bluesky. 😄
I do think the "trivial to migrate part" is just as important and should be a core part of the protocol so that it's not optional.
As naive of a solution as it may be, I think we must acknowledge and address the fact that the average person does not care about instances, and that for them the friction of choosing one at first can be detrimental.
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@goncalossilva @danilo bluesky has a totally different goal than fedi. in particular, bluesky is a single platform controlled by a single corporation (see Christine's excellent thread/post a couple days ago on that topic).
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@goncalossilva @danilo whether we "must" acknowledge this depends on what our goals are. accepting centralization is totally fine if the goal is just to have a place to talk, without it being important to be free to set the terms on which we discuss things, decide in a community-driven way what behavior is acceptable, not be sued by right-wing organizations to force us to treat queer people on the platform as criminals, etc
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io a big difference between bsky and fedi is that bsky moderation can remove your account regardless of PDS. Nobody on fedi can just remove your account from the entire network by denylisting you on the relay so servers can't find you.
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io I'm conflicted with giving bsky this power. Although they seem to be on "our" side it worries me. I came from centralized platforms where years of me being on there could be erased in a single moderation decision. I do not like it, I hate what happened to me on tumblr. Bsky hasn't shown that they are going full 1984 yet, and they seem to use it carefully but that's something to be aware of. Especially as bsky continues to be in the spotlight of regulatory bodies and governments. Sure, they might not make that choice but what if they're pressured into it? Whole can of worms.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo so, we should mention at this point that we've been involved with content policy development in the course of our tech accountability activism (most of it back while we were at google)
on the basis of that experience we feel qualified to say that when newer, smaller platforms aren't oppressive it's because they aren't big enough to have an urgent financial and legal need to be oppressive, yet
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo there is not actually a way for a corporate entity running a communication platform, within the law, to not make the most vacuous, substance-free place in which anything of any importance is disallowed
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo and if there were, it would be incompatible with profit, so it wouldn't happen anyway
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo the rules that humans have made for ourselves have a certain hypocrisy baked into them, they only make sense on the assumption they cannot be enforced
centralized communication platforms make it possible to enforce the contradictory rules, which also makes it necessary
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io This is not to take away from the fact fedi moderation can be at times terrible. It fucking sucks, I really wish there was a way to give people a taste of fedi administration without traumatizing them. I think that instances have a lot of self governance and that's a good thing but it's also what makes this platform hard to sell to people. I think that people should be encouraged to empower themselves by hosting an instance instead of joining one that's already made. I really like that model, and I wish it was more accessible (luckily things like https://activitypods.org/ seem to exist? I don't know shit about activitypods so I am hesitant to say they are the solution. I do know a variety of admins around me want to make "managed hosting" available to people wanting to self govern without the headache of being responsible for things like S3 storage or the technical aspect)
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@ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @goncalossilva@fosstodon.org @danilo@hachyderm.io I say this as an administrator of an instance that's growing. I love the community. I just don't think it's possible to make a "diverse" community that scales up. https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ eventually people get pushed out. I like that fedi is sort of designed in a way that it's relatively easy to prevent (larger instances can have portions of their user base split out into smaller instances and still communicate with each other). It's why I administrate multiple instances (this is the one I am "head" of but I help out with smaller instances around this community). It's a super difficult problem. Everything is opinionated and centers around the fedi admin. I am a strong proponent of things like user level defederation. You know as much as I enjoy having all of this power (i don't) even I get frustrated. If I don't want my account to appear on an instance there should be a way for me and exclusively me to make that decision for myself and myself only. It shouldn't be instance wide because that subjects everyone on here to that decision.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @goncalossilva @danilo absolutely. it does not scale beyond very small groups of people who all know each other. it fundamentally cannot.
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@puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo @ireneista it's hugely problematic and exactly one of the main reasons I want the Fediverse to ~~win~~ see mass adoption. :)
I agree that no single corporation should hold this much power.
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo we frankly don't see mass adoption as "winning", or even particularly desirable, certainly not at the cost of the reasons we're here in the first place. that's our personal view and you're free to disagree, but that is why we spent so many words on describing possible purposes people might have for this.
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo if in fact we are talking about unrelated and contradictory goals - which appears to be the case - then of course we are going to disagree about what course of action to take. it makes no sense to argue back and forth about what we should do if we aren't agreed on what we want to achieve.
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@ireneista @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo definitely, I appreciate the civil discussion regardless. :)
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@goncalossilva @puppygirlhornypost2 @danilo yes, thank you, we do appreciate that as well
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@goncalossilva @danilo and, like, if that's what you want, go for it? you know where to find it?
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@goncalossilva @danilo to us personally those things would defeat the entire purpose, there is no reason to be here if we give up on that stuff
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@ireneista @danilo perhaps my point wasn't clear, but it's not about giving up any of these things, but to provide an easy default path.
To draw a parallel, it's not about not having settings. It's about having reasonable defaults.
Most people don't want to make difficult choices they don't understand the ramifications of before they start using a product/platform.
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@goncalossilva @danilo look, you're proposing to imitate a well-trodden path but you're expecting to get different results.
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@goncalossilva @danilo we agree with your observation about the serious challenge that newcomers face, just not with your conclusion about what to do about it.
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@goncalossilva @danilo it is really important to learn from history. you backed away from the email example, but we actually think it's a super important and relevant one.
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