Gregory's ServerBoost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon & the Fediverse whether or not it's more popular than Bluesky.
 229 comments
12
@JesseSkinner they serve different functions for me. besides, if the people saying it's going to turn into X 2.0 aren't wearing tinfoil hats, it'll be nice to have somewhere to rely on.  @JesseSkinner I'll be with the nerdy kids in the library, thanks. :catjam:  @JesseSkinner Bridging to bluesky should be enough. I still enjoy a non-algorithm view more than chasing a computer algorithm to boost things for me! Remember when Twitface threw people off the platform and they started GAB. GAB was described as right wing, extremist, porn, conspiracy, tin-foil, etc. Now we have Bluesky. It is starting to gain traction among those whose ideas attract criticism on Twitface. The open marketplace of ideas is much like the scientific method where ideas are challenged. When useless ideas fail to pass the challenge, they go to Bluesky.     @JesseSkinner blusky is already indoctrinated and filled with little lying soldiers with "ban" lists. FUCK THEM  @JesseSkinner I'm counting on it staying like it is. It's the perfect social media platform for antisocial people :) Who cares which is more popular. I care which is more effective and less toxic. I'm sticking around. Same here. I really don't care how popular something is - if IMO something is toxic and/or garbage, I simply will not use it. So I'm staying here, and staying off bsky (just as I've been staying off WhatsApp and Telegram). Likewise, I barely use FB these days and have no desire at all to use any of the other platforms you named. I'm selective about who I connect with, both online and IRL - I want to be in contact with people who enhance my life, not negative/toxic individuals who will only drain my energy. The lament in all this is well meaning people who were still willing to have a polite normal conversation and engage in fact driving political discourse have been driven from the "virtual public square" to protect our own wellbeing. What's left is a mob willing feed on each other, share misinformation, and rip away at society. Sane voices on those other platforms were drowned out, now they are just gone. The inmates run the asylum.  @NJWookie same here. popularity orientation is an illness. whereas quality orientation is what serves me best in all cases. @JesseSkinner I'll not boost because that has FB-share-meme energy. 😬 I'll stay in the Fediverse. But I also have my account bridged th BS and interact with my friends there. @Glatorius agreed! But I just wanted to spread some shared love for this platform at a time when the other is getting a lot of hype and attention. @JesseSkinner Bluesky/atproto main, Mastodon/fediverse side here. They've got different use cases for me. Basically the only folks left here from the heyday & who actually still post with any regularity are @lisamelton @hacks4pancakes & two folks I know who are ideologically opposed to Bluesky/atproto. Everyone else is on Bluesky/atproto & loving it. I also can't post everything here that I post over there b/c of my instance, & switching instances on Mastodon/fedi is not w/out costs. You need to follow new people! 😀 I know some folks who are on Bluesky, but none of the people I hear from regularly on here even talk about it as a serious consideration. @deirdrebeth I mean... Sure, but does require the folks that I want to keep in touch with / the internet personalities (e.g., tech podcasters) that I follow actually joining Mastodon/fedi. Many of them made an account years ago & don't post to it. Many more of them never made a Mastodon/fedi account & are just migrating from X to Bluesky/atproto. I've also lost folks to instances shutting down due to maintenance costs / interserver admin drama & being turned off of Mastodon/fedi due to that. 100% if you're trying to follow specific people. The "follow more" only works if your looking for active posters in general, rather than specifics. I used X to follow topics (ice hockey, BLM, breaking news, etc.) rather than people, so moving here was smooth as silk. I'm likely in the minority with that! @JesseSkinner I'm staying. I like both. Bluesky is an easy transition for friends. I still has flamers, but definitely an improvement over X. @JesseSkinner Me, I am only here. Gave up owned social media two years ago. Very happy here. @JesseSkinner @magdalenahai “Boo, engagement bait.” Sike! No such thing here! No algorithm to feed, just people sharing ideas, whoo! @JHKoivula yep! I'm just spreading the love, not looking for follows or anything. This isn't about me, it's about our love for the fediverse!  @JesseSkinner Neither a thing's popularity nor its obscurity has stopped me from enjoying it. I got over that phase in my teens. @JesseSkinner Mastodon is great, but to make it even better for professional use it might help if something like the "top-links" in the "catch-up" (Beta) window of #phanpy (https://phanpy.social/ ) is the home page by default for all users. These top-links are sorted by the number of times boosted by the ones *you follow*. This could be useful for #science, to highlight most important developments (e.g. publications) in your network. Now you easily miss them, causing some colleagues to leave. @geertaarts @JesseSkinner Why should it be good for professional use? Not being good for professional use makes it more good for actually *social* use. @maccruiskeen @JesseSkinner OK, also social. Let's say you follow 200 others, and you stick to them, because you like their messages. Let's say 100 of them post/boost 5 messages per day. That is 500 messages in your timeline/day. A more silent friend or colleague posts one message per month, which might be quite important for both the sender and receiver. It is quickly snowed under. @geertaarts @maccruiskeen you can turn on notifications on a per-account basis - so those friends whose posts you don't want to miss, click their profile and click the bell icon and their posts will show up in your notifications. @maccruiskeen @geertaarts @JesseSkinner there probably needs to be a separate LinkedInOdon @JesseSkinner I figure Bluesky has a couple of good years ahead of it before the inevitable enshittification takes hold, and Mastodon will still be there, insulated by decentralized design from corporate shenanigans and crypto-bro wingnuttiness.  @JesseSkinner I don't care whether it's popular, I care whether I can find my kind of freaks there. I never spent much time on Twitter (well, at least not for somebody who's chronically online), but I spent a lot of time on Tumblr before all the cool people left. Right now, I'm on both Mastodon and Bsky, but I spend much more time on the fediverse because of how much better it feels in comparison. @JesseSkinner I originally stayed away from BS because Dorsey created it in a fit of pique after twitter banned Trump for spreading hate speech. Then after Dorsey left, BS was still being run by twitter people. And now there's this: https://journa.host/@scottmstedman/113484829252227669 @bhrarchinerd Bluesky isn't being run by Twitter people. The only relationship Jay Graber had to Twitter was that Twitter gave her a bunch of money to establish bsky and she demanded to be independent of Twitter Inc. The investment is actually good news. Graber and her team still own and fully control the company, and the investors got very little power from their investment. They have one board seat that does not give them control of anything. The investors are not "major shareholders.”  @JesseSkinner I'm not here to be popular. Besides, I've made friends here. 🧡  @JesseSkinner #Bluesky is a commercial vehicle of venture capitalists. ActivityPub is the only way forward, so I will stay on the fediverse. @JesseSkinner Mastodon for nerdy stuff, Bluesky more as a Twitter/X replacement. I’m rooting for Bluesky and hope it succeeds beyond our expectations @moira There will be no sudden-but-inevitable betrayal with Bluesky. There can't be. The tech is so open that the network could move on without the Bluesky PBC. Even if the company went rogue or disappeared overnight, the network would still be possible to run without them. That's the difference between atproto and ActivityPub. You lose everything if your instances goes belly-up overnight. You lose nothing on atproto. @moira No, it's true right now. Nearly every part of the infrastructure is open source.  @MikeBeas I'm unaware of any other... what do they call them, collector nodes? The stream collectors through which everything must pass. I mean, _I have seen people running BlueSky instances talking about this_, and they were saying that they don't exist yet, that everything has to go through central. I mean, it's possible they're _also_ out of date, but I'd think people actually running their own instances would be caught up on this stuff. @MikeBeas (Also also I'm not beating up on them for not having portable identity figured out with only a quasi-functional placeholder in its stead. Last I heard it was even called something like PH for PlaceHolder, which I found pretty amusing. That's a hard problem and good luck to them getting a real version to work.) @moira PLC, and it's not a placeholder anymore. It's now a backronym for "Public Ledger of Credentials" and they're looking to hand it off to a web standards body so they don't control it. @moira (Even if they retain control of PLC forever, all of the data is public so anyone could just mirror the data and it would be possible to point at that mirror instead of the official ledger, and nothing would be amiss) @moira Relays. Nobody is currently running one because nobody needs to, but people have spun them up locally and done proofs-of-concept with them to show that it can be done. @MikeBeas I suppose I want to say: _I'm not rooting against them._ I just think that they're never going to be the kind of distributed that AP can be and that creates a particular set of types of problems that can't be handwaved away, once of which being the _reliance_ on Relay. Thanks for the update on portable identity. Assuming it's still blockchain-record based (as it was supposedly going to be) maybe it'll be the first actually _good_ use of that technology. (2/2)   @JesseSkinner Mastodon is the only European platform so that’s what I’m sticking with, I guess  @JesseSkinner I host my instance which is a fun little project, so I have no good reason to "leave." I'm on #Bluesky as well but I barely use it, plus there is so much fluff posts there compared to Mastodon/Activitypub it's unbelievable. @JesseSkinner I’m using Spoutible and Mastodon as my go-tos but I can cross-post to Mastodon and Bsky from Spoutible for max reach. I’m also on the DAIR-community.social server but I can’t cross-post from that one yet so I set this one up.  @JesseSkinner Ha, I just wrote this: Why I'm active on Mastodon more than other Social Media. https://alanlangford.com/2024/11/18/why-im-active-on-mastodon-more-than-other-social-media/  @JesseSkinner @lisamelton I’m so over billionaire owned platforms. Here I get run my own server and manage my own data.  @JesseSkinner not to be rude but someone saying “boost this toot if” guarantees that I won’t.   @JesseSkinner i think we all know where this is going - steel cage ladder match, mastodon wins and steals users from bluesky  @JesseSkinner  Why should I go to Bluesky and meet those guys I didn't want to see on Twitter at the first place? @CGdoppelpunkt @JesseSkinner I wouldn't mind following some them through bridge, but they don't even care to follow bsky account ap.brid.gy which would enable ActivityPub bridging... @JesseSkinner I’m here for interesting and intelligent people. Hard to find on “popular” social media @JesseSkinner I'm going to be keeping a presence on both bluesky and mastodon. There is room for more than one social media platform. For most folks, it'll probably be easier for them to move over to Bluesky  Sorry, no Mastodon for me. I use Friendica. Which is another reason why the fediverse is better.
 @JesseSkinner I am! I find it refreshing not to have an algorithm that chooses what to show me and what not @JesseSkinner @kelvin0mql @JesseSkinner might be a technical glitch? :shiba_confused: there are 6~8 edits all noted at the same minute with no actual edit :zerotwo_shrug: @JesseSkinner To be honest, I am on the fence. Most of the time I am using Openvibe to see both Mastodon and Bluesky  @JesseSkinner I hate Mastodon but will stick around on my GotoSocial portion of the Fediverse. Mastodon is almost solely responsible for all the spamwaves we see here and all the reply spam.  @JesseSkinner My community is here... It has long been here... And if I leave, it'd be for blogging! I guess I don't see the point of restricting one's use of social media. If I use Bluesky, why would that make my presence on Mastodon any different? Why would it matter if I use both, or neither? I'm on Tumblr, as well, why would anyone care? Why gatekeep, I guess is my question.  Depends on how many platforms you want to juggle, I guess. I use this space, plus ipernity, plus Ko-Fi. A fandom board or two, and email, too. That already feels like more than enough. I'm satisfied. (Have a DA account but will probably delete it soon, as I'm sick of their AI-huckster bullshit. I haven't posted there since early summer.) @JesseSkinner Just signed up to Bluesky for a specific hashtag & followers who have moved from X. @Ruddred same, I'll go on there to read some web dev stuff from important industry folks, but I'm not planning to post on there. @JesseSkinner I don't like BlueSky already because of how it displays replies and notifications. And Elon will probably buy it someday @Lydie It's not possible for Elon to buy it for many reasons. First off there's just... nothing to buy. There's nothing that would give him control of the network. It's fully open and the second he bought any part of it, people could just easily start up another copy of it without his involvement. Second, the company isn't for sale and would never sell to him even if it was, because they are extremely opposed to him. The CEO of bsky demanded total independence from Twitter for a reason.  @JesseSkinner @mdmrn It certainly seems like any algorithm-based social media is poison for the body politic and our mental health, so… I’ll interact with any services that federate or are linkable, but I’m not seeing any value to another larger Twitter-a-like for me. @cthellis Bluesky isn't algorithm-based. The default feed is reverse chronological. So not sure how this is relevant.  @JesseSkinner "...sticking around Mastodon..." I'm not quite sure, yet. I've seen more activity from historians and archeologists in three days on Bluesky than I have in two years on Mastodon. @JesseSkinner my people that i've connected the most with, and recently are here, enough said  @JesseSkinner I am sticking around, but don't see a strong reason to boost this. Don't care if others do though. @JesseSkinner I happily use both for different purposes. In my observation, Bluesky is twitter when it good. Mastodon is more of the scholarly one. Maybe that's just because of who I follow,. :)  @JesseSkinner Do you all have any good sources/lists of accounts to follow? My feed is quite empty! @georgeward best thing is to follow some hashtags of your interests, and then follow anyone who seems decent that's talking about those topics. Keep that up over a few weeks and you'll have a pretty active home feed. You can also look at the global feed to discover people outside of those hashtags. @JesseSkinner Fediverse is like a penitentiary for people who are banned from their regular forums. You'll be back. @JesseSkinner I took a look at bluesky today, my timeline on mastodon is way more active and interesting.  @JesseSkinner twitter, threads, mySpace, Facebook: all will fall Mastodon will be the little rodents with the little whiskers, hiding in the debris...  I've internetted for 30 years and been through all the things. @JesseSkinner is there a polite word for #enshittification so I can warn people about BlueSky and save them the bother? #fediverse is best! @JesseSkinner I’m just salty that Bluesky’s extended invite rollout meant I couldn’t get my preferred username over there. (Here, it matters far less as there’s one on every instance!)  @JesseSkinner I’m done #billionaires. #TeamOrca can have ‘em all for lunch. 🤷🏻♂️ @JesseSkinner Fedi exclusively. I’ll never trust a corporate/venture capital funded platform again. A profit motive immediately compromises their users even if they are well intended in the beginning.  At some point I will give up on both if the predominant topic of Mastodon and Bluesky continues to be . . . Mastodon and Bluesky 😉 I've never been into populism ... or hero worship of celebrities, sportspeople etc ... @JesseSkinner I'm sticking to Masto. I have NO desire to be involved with another tech bro money grab. I deleted my Bluesky account. Although, I do have a Substack account because when I get over my anger, Imma have some shit to say. @JesseSkinner I am the extremely rare type of person who only uses good websites and who does not ever use shit websites so I will be on mastodon, I'm just built different @JesseSkinner Hell, I consider this my primary. I consider it my last stop on the social networking roller coaster. I will, however, diversify though other sites like BSky (less interested in Threads at this point), etc as the need arises. But Masto just feels like home at this point. Love the folks I meet here, and I enjoy not having the system's behavior tethered to the whims of billionaires, and those trying to make shareholders happy.  @JesseSkinner Isn’t it all just too exhausting? I’m invested here, so unless Mastodon really turns utterly boring… I’m here for the long run. There’s one possibility I might return to Twitter though: Too bad Masto missed its chance to be the best alternative for Xhitter. What a waste of potential.  @JesseSkinner An absolute no brainer. Am Twitter refugee of a couple of years ago - could not bring myself to give Musk's platform credibility or eyeballs. And this has grown into wonderful group of people with such good variety of information. I also know that follower counts aren't as meaningful as engagement - which one gets here on Mastodon. And I will never again be on a platform where my social graph is at the mercy of a corporation/owner - especially as they tend to get loonier with time.  My hope is that two-way interaction with Bluesky improves and becomes more seamless. It works now, but it needs to work better.  |
@JesseSkinner
Anyone who's seen my TL already knows that popularity isn't something I strive for. :P