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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@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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@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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