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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The biggest cause for gnashing teeth and rending clothes in the replies here is an insistence that there is no “game” and that winning is simultaneously not a thing and not important
But that’s just not living in reality.
Software IS a game. The best fucking game ever played.
A game of constraints and resources. Of finite time and energy, of developers, maintainers and users.
Play the game well and you can earn your slice of finite resources. Play it poorly and lose to those who have.
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When Mastodon insists the game is variously nonexistent or unimportant, it’s because the culture has internalized an inability to play:
To strategize, to empathize, to design against constraints, to mitigate sharp edges, to create something that is broadly beloved and relied upon.
“I like it small, I don’t care if people use it” consigns the entire movement/protocol/product to marginal status and limited impact
Which seems incompatible with the ideological heavy handedness around every corner
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The Mastodon faithful murmur and mutter catechisms of enshittification as though it’s printed on a prayer card they carry everywhere
But while the dogma animates them to loathing other models of social media platforms, it does not move them to the work of winning the game.
Kinda weird to me, I dunno.
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Winning the game matters:
Bluesky is now sending more traffic than Threads, by 2x, to The Guardian. Other publications reporting similar.
People love sharing links, love getting great links. But the dominant social media platforms penalize this behavior.
An insurgent platform that supplants incumbents has the ability to change the overall landscape of the web, and to change the behavior of incumbents who must compete with it.
This is the power Mastodon rejects.
https://bsky.app/profile/earleyedition.bsky.social/post/3lbvwgzurbc2y
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The game exists, the game is real, and winning the game comes with the power to make change. Let the platform stagnate and die mad about it, or pick up the ball and make a strategy to get back in the game. Those are the options.
Letting Mastodon continue to shed users squanders investments that could otherwise reshape the trajectory of the open web.
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@danilo cool story bro.
It really seems like the only mad person in this whole thread is you?
The game doesn’t have to exist, and it’s all in your head. Meanwhile I’ll go back to reading Scalzi and looking at cool Timelapses from the subarctic.
I hope you learn to let this go and find some peace.
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