Bluesky has gained a million new users in the last three days.
The platform posted about the milestone this afternoon, which it crossed after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a ban on Elon Musk’s X yesterday as part of an ongoing feud with the platform.
Apparently, enough are headed to Bluesky to drive its iOS app to the top of the Brazilian App Store, as TechCrunch writes.
I’m sad that a lot of people couldn’t perceive the mastodon in the room.
Mastodon’s original app is just trash Threads are completely unreadable, it should be like that of X
The thing that goes against what most people are used to is the fact that most fediverse services either don’t have an official app or the official app is just a proof of concept. You’re kind of expected to use either the website directly or third party apps, which are usually much better.
When I still used my Mastodon account I used Megalodon and was testing Moshidon as well. Now I just use the PWA for the Sharkey instance I’m on.
Which instance are you on?
Sakurajima. They have a Mastodon instance too.
Very japan focused. Be warned if you’re not some kind of weeb.
+1 for Sharkey. It’s my favorite of the protocols, so far.
What makes it your favorite?
Mainly the 5000 character limit. It handles MFM (though I don’t really use it), and features like antennas (very specific follow lists).
Good. Super-fast growth fucks with local internet culture. Look at what happened to reddit when digg died.
the last time I tried to make a mastodon account I had to type a paragraph about why i want an account and then wait for an email approval and I don’t know what the hell happened because I forgot to look for the email and by now I don’t give a shit
When you try do sign up on the Mastodon app it defaults to and recommends mastodon.social, which does nothing of this sort. The average user will just keep this default and be fine.
im not sure what happened i think i was taking a shit
I didn’t even know Mastodon has an exclusive club streak lol.
Just like Lemmy, some Mastodon instances have measures in place to try and prevent bots.
And it’s also a way for topic focused servers to filter out signups as well. There are general purpose instances with open sign ups that don’t do that.
Yeah, I got into Fosstodon right before they went invite only. And then I moved to a Sharkey instance.
Since I was a poor little kid in the slums of Nairobi with no internet access I dreamed about having a
<service>account. […]
Can’t fault them. I went through three different instances, one because I disagreed with some of their policies, I don’t remember why I left the second one, I want to say it was technical issues but I honestly don’t remember. Then the third one got closed down because the owner had IRL issues they needed to take care of. Also that instance was on some defederation list because some mod from a large instance had an argument with a mod on my instance.
Ultimately I ran my own solo instance for a while but lost interest eventually. Mastodon is frankly a shitshow and as long as it stays like that, federation or not makes it just a slightly worse twitter, just with some mods taking the role of Elmo instead.
Finding the right mastodon instance was incredibly annoying. I use it, but barely. Most of the artists I follow are on Bluesky, anyway, which is a lot easier to use.
Mastodon allows you to transfer your followers when you migrate, so it’s not a big deal if you change your mind about the first instance you had chosen.
Transferring also means losing your post history, it all gets stuck on the instance you left behind.
You lost an average user at “instance”, long before “transferring an account”. It’s a big deal.
That may be true for someone just looking to sign up with no help, but if they come across a guide or if their friend helps them, then it’s easy.
So you agree with me. To succeed, a product shouldn’t require a guide or a friend’s help to install and configure it. I work in IT, yet I don’t see people around me bothering with all that. Now think of your relatives, friends, people you see every day on the street or in a mall - they couldn’t care less.
Well, entering Mastodon in the search bar of a search engine today shows that it’s even easier than it was during the big Twitter exodus. The first link is mastodon.social. Clicking that lands you on a page where Create an account is highlighted in blue. From there, it’s the standard signup process everyone is used to.
Edit: Rewrote the comment to focus on the actual flow today rather than anything speculative.
Early in, the Fediverse gained traction with people that were banned from Twitter and others when it had moderation besides for the word “cis” and to suppress leftist viewpoints. Now that Twitter has none, those people have crawled back alongside with the crypto bros, but the bad name generated by gab, truth social, etc. still prevail.
Also people are way too dumb to realize what an instance is (people already have trouble realizing e-mail is not a tech invented by Google for Gmail), defederation dramas, drama around loli, no algorithm “to suggest the users whatever they interested in”, less users, generally fediverse apps being way less addictive, etc.
way too dumb
Or, more likely in most cases, don’t care and don’t want to care.
isn’t that another way of calling ignorance aka being dumb?
There’s only so many hours in the day. There is something to be said for doing the convenient thing that doesn’t have a learning curve if you’re just trying to enjoy yourself.
Of course, imho, being aware of your own lack of knowledge is something already.
Frankly? I’m happy that they didn’t end in Mastodon. Most of those users would have negative value there, and in the Fediverse as a whole.
Twitter was always a cesspool of assumptive, entitled, whiny, nationalistic, context-illiterate users, who’d spend most of their time finding reasons to screech at each other (and at you) than sharing interesting content. That’s regardless of language, but it was specially egregious among Brazilian users there. And it got only worse when Musk bought it, as suddenly the alt right users felt themselves justified to soapbox nonstop there.
Most people with a shred of dignity got the fuck out of that shithole ages ago. The ones not doing so were, most of the time, the ones saying “this is fine, this is how it’s supposed to be”. And those are the ones migrating to Bluesky now.
Someone might say “but we could integrate them into Mastodon. They’d behave better.” Well… we’re talking about a large horde of users, they’d be more likely to bring the place down than let the place bring them up. Eternal September style.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September. That was the beginning of the end for old reddit.
Dunno if Reddit got its own Eternal September, but the one that I’m referring to was in 1993, predating Reddit by 12y. It was a huge influx of new internet users, specially evident in the Usenet. Wikipedia has a good article on that, but to keep it short: if you got a huge flood of newcomers at once, you aren’t able to enforce the social norms of a place that keep it friendly and nice; instead the new users force the standard to be lowered.
Wild that Reddit’s creation is closer to the start of the Eternal September than it is to today (19 years).
I agree that it’s wild. And it’s a bit bittersweet for me.
Usenet - and the old internet as a whole - were all about humans sharing stuff between themselves: I see something cool, I give you the link, you see something cool. While modern platforms try to remove the human from the equation, make them invisible: I see something cool, I “endorse” (upvote, like etc.) it, and that endorsement is used by some algorithm to automatically pick what you’re supposed to be seeing.
Reddit is both and neither at the same time. The links are manually picked and shared, like in the old internet; but they’re algorithmically sorted and ranked as in the new internet. It’s like a product of the old internet trying to carve its way into the new internet, but never completely ditching its roots.
Perhaps that’s why that site lasted so long. And I hope that one day we’re going to say “a shame that it died”.
I was a redditor pre Eternal September.
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
The point of Eternal September is that it happens all the time, so when was that?
Kind of - it doesn’t happen “all” the time; it has a beginning, but no end.
If you consider it’s the influx of new users, then yes, it does happen all the time. Do you have a different definition?
What’s “eternal” in “Eternal September” is not the influx of new users, but rather the disruption of the social norms caused by a huge and sudden influx of new users.
That disruption started in 1993, and never ended. So it had a beginning but no end as of yet.
A not-so-recent fediverse Brazilian user here, before all the X incident in Brazil. I joined Mastodon exactly 1 month ago. Since the beginning, I was only interacting with non-brazilian Mastodon users. In the last few days, however, I’ve been noticing more and more brazilian posts emerging inside Mastodon feeds, even in my home feed (where I follow hashtags such as #poetry, #poems, #occult, #hermeticism, #art and #aiart, as well as non-brazilian users that I’ve been following). Seems like brazilians are spreading across the many existing alternatives, not just Threads or BlueSky. It’s exactly what happened when WhatsApp or Telegram got temporarily blocked here: people started spreading across Discord, Signal, Matrix and so on.
It’s fine if it’s only a handful of users. Even if they’re from Musk’s Xithole*. My issue would be if a lot of people saw Mastodon and said “it’s Twitter, with an elephant instead of bird!”, still behaving like Twitter users.
*desculpe-me pela piada besta; não resisti.
Wait people didn’t join Mastodon as well? Just Bluesky?
That’s actually a good question. Surely Mastodon and Lemmy instances should have also seen an uptick in registrations?
I saw some posts on Mastodon yesterday celebrating an influx of Brazilian signups, but it was pretty modest compared to the massive exodus to Bluesky. Which, honestly, seems about right and proportionate. (I love Mastodon, but it doesn’t feel like a 1:1 replacement for Twitter the way Bluesky does.)
They did, but it’s nothing huge.
Mastodon isn’t a straight replacement for twitter, bluesky is.
Mastodon is a bi replacement for twitter.
Why is that?
Federation is a pretty straightforward concept once you understand it and have basic knowledge of networking and software. However many people (apparently the majority of people) find it to be too complicated to understand.
The average user is unfortunately, still to this day, an idiot.
Yes, I tried the mastodon app probably about 4 years ago before I knew what federation was. I could not figure out how to sign up and ultimately gave up. There needs to be an app/website that explains it well and guides you through the process.
And honestly both bluesky and mastodon do a poor job if this.
Mastodon does have as many arbitrary restrictions for one.
From what I can tell from within the Mastodon echo chamber: quote replies and moderation
Sure, but there are other ActivityPub protocol softwares that have quote replies and moderation, that aren’t Mastodon. I think the challenge is getting the average user to seek out an instance running one of those softwares and not just mastodon dot social.
Problem is there’s no marketing money to make the better platforms more widely known because there’s not as much monetization of the users to fund it.
I’m perfectly fine being part of a community not driven by capitalism. It means there’s a lot less incentive to create spam bots. I also can’t run my own BlueSky instance, but I can run Lemmy/Mastodon pretty easily, just like an email server.
Edit: I didn’t realize BlueSky was also federated, but just using a different protocol. I don’t think that was an option back when I set up lemmy.
I do really wish mastodon had normal quote replies. I believe they decided not include it for reasons related to harassment or bullying. I don’t really get it since you can do practically the same thing but just linking to the post in yours. The mastodon UI even makes it look almost the same as a quote reply.
Also a bunch of hinky weirdness and slowness.
The Technology Connections guy (Alex) threw some shade on Mastodon yesterday that seemed like a good example:
My favorite thing about Bluesky is that I haven’t gotten a stream of notifications that I’ve been tagged in a post on a weird fork of the software which my client doesn’t parse correctly so I only see one side of a conversation.
I thought his name was Alec, not Alex.
It is. Autocorrect and bad proofreading. Thanks, fixed.
Also from my experience the users on BlueSky are pretty much a straight swap from Twitter. And by that I mean nobody ever bothers interacting with me at all.
On mastodon if I so much as rip a fart on there, *someone* will engage with it. On BlueSky? Nada.
normies are allergic to anything other than corporate social media and software
I had originally been 100% against Bluesky because of Jack Dorsey, but when he got so steamed about them doing things like actual moderation and left entirely back to Twitter to pettily suck up to Musk, I really started feeling like maybe Bluesky might not be so bad after all.
Create, Grow, Moderate, Sell, Repeat.
I prefer Embrace, extend, and extinguish
Is there any relation between Bluesky and Dorsey now? Does he own any of it?
No relation now
Downloaded it. Signed up. Replied to a post about rechargeable batteries. Account got restricted. Left.
Restricted to the whole site or just that user? The user tools are pretty powerful on their own.
Not sure what I got blocked from. Might poke around later and see. Guess I upset a bot by using a colon or something.
Maybe the phrase “white ones are better” triggered some moderation bot?
Yeah this 100%.
Good point!
I feel so sorry for you about this WTF but I can’t stop laughing!
don’t hold as much power as the black ones
and
the white ones are better
don’t go particularly well with automated detection and moderation tools.
Well, everybody knows Black Eneloop Batteries’ Lives Matter!
I heard Brazil did not ban twitter for good reasons, it can be to block a passage of speech.
elon musk was asked to point a legal rep and show up to answer questions about spreading fake news and promoting criminal activity. He denied. There is some backlash as the judge giva the final warning on twitter since there was no legal rep, which would be a first.
Wrong.
‘speech’ is just what modern king wannabes use to claim they are above anyone else, including a sovereign state’s laws. People like Elon, Trump, Putin all want to be above any law or form of responsibility.
You heard it wrong, we are punishing the ones that did our January 6th and said nazis should have a party to vote, Musk refused, wtf should a country do then?
inb4 in 8 years time “Greensky a.k.a. Trust Me Guys This is THE New Twitter Forever” gains a million new users in the last 3 days.
The fediverse is seeing an uptick as well. Elons enshitofication continues. Good for us I suppose.
900k of them are bots getting ready.
Such gross weirdo-behavior to call 900k completely normal people looking to socialize online bots, get off your high horse
I can’t help but pronounce it like a Slavic surname.
“Bluesky! You didn’t file your paperwork last night.”
If that ain’t the name of a New York police chief from the 80s with Polish heritage, I don’t know what is
Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?
I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.
If you follow the AP bridge @ap.brid.gy there you’ll be fine.
It’s more valuable than Twitter and threads to me… It really is only missing video and I’ll be fully sold and hashtags seem to work… I just don’t use them often
Didn’t India just ban Twitter or something?
Edit: It was Brazil.
BJP would never as they’re fascists themselves.
Bluesky has gained a
millionbrazilion new users…I’m so sorry, it was right there. And yay for Bluesky!
As a brazilian, I’m now deeply offended that the ISO does not recognize brazilion as a valid amount
I mean they desperately spam mails to make people join. Also name anyone who isn’t using bots or is getting used by bots these days?
Blue Sky is the only one that allows porn and has no defederation drama, so I’m not surprised people went there. Instagram even put a banner telling people to try out threads but who would trust Zuck?
Twitter allows porn now, no?
Yes, and that’s why it’s hard for artists and their fans to leave, a social media that allows that and normal people posts together has massive visibility compared to enthusiasts site.
Non-twitter is fine in any form. Real progress is gonna be going to Mastodon, although that’s hamstrung by user-unfriendliness.
Mastadon has definitely improved it’s user onboarding process. When I first tried, and failed, to use it 3 years ago it was awful. Signing up a year ago was a painless process. It may not be fully ready for the mainstream just yet, but it’s definitely getting there.
While I agree with you. I don’t think it’s user unfriendly I think of it as a normie blocker. That being said, bluesky is owning class social media, I expect the enshittification to start now that they have a million + users.
“Normie blocker” is just how abnormies rationalize bad design
Sounds weird from inside the echo chamber though
Except it’s not. It’s real easy to learn you can choose any instance you’re welcome to. Normies are the ones choosing not to learn.
I do feel sorry for them because they’re probably going to get pushed to the next billionaires social media in the next decade to be exploited there too.
Unless I’m completely missing something? What’s so bad about the design? I’m pretty dumb and uneducated and I dig me some federated social media purely because it’s genuine compared to the owning class social media.
I’m pretty dumb and uneducated
Statistically speaking, the mere fact that you are here indicates that you are among the top percentages of tech literal people. This isn’t necessarily about intelligence or general education, but about tech literacy.
Brah, I’m not a normie. That’s why we’re talking on Lemmy.
That’s… exactly what I’m saying. Did you misunderstand my comment perhaps? Normies are not “choosing” not to learn, they just literally don’t have the tech literacy skills to easily participate in the fediverse. The fediverse should improve its UX to allow more people to participate.
Sadly literate and tech literate don’t always go hand in hand.
Personally I wish there was a better way to link multiple accounts together to say they’re the same person. When I switched to hosting my own instance, I basically just abandoned my old account, but I would have loved to link them to have the history there.
We have the technology, it could be as simple as SSH keys, or like how bitcoin wallets are unique and don’t require internet to verify a match.Edit: I actually just discovered that this is one of the main feature differences between ActivityPub and BlueSky’s AT Protocol. BlueSky has “account portability”, and now that you can self-host it, I’m seriously considering setting it up. It would be really nice if we get an update that lets the protocols federate with each other. I think that BlueSky has said they intend to support ActivityPub federation in the future.
ActivityPub actually has a similar mechanism of a “Move” activity. There are just very few implementations that support that kind of thing.
The main problem with that seems to be that the original server needs to be active to migrate. If the instance I’m on shuts down or is uncooperative, then my account history is gone. And for Mastodon, that’s even worse if you have a bunch of followers. These are all reasons I decided to self-host before I built up too much of a presence.
Right, of course. I don’t really see any way any protocol can get around that though. If the original server is suddenly just gone, there is no way to tell it to move your account elsewhere. Hopefully such a situation should happen very rarely though.
Seriously yea. Same reason Linux user experience is generally bad. Unfortunately engineers usually make for poor designers.
user-unfriendliness.
I can’t really disagree with this, since I’ve personally seen folks make a casual attempt and bounce off Mastodon, and it comes up enough online that it feels like it has to be true, but at the same time I’ve got this reflexive skepticism since I’m an absolute idiot and managed to figure out how to have a good time on Mastodon and really enjoy it. (I signed up in the spring of 2023, though, so can’t speak to earlier times.) I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person. So I really wonder what it is specifically that frustrates folks enough to just give up on Mastodon when I, an amiable doofus of the highest order, love it so much.
I have additional Thoughts on cultural issues that might disappoint people who were expecting Mastodon to replicate whatever specific era of pre-Musk Twitter they yearn for, but it can’t *just *be that. There has to be some technical barrier a lot of folks are stumbling over, right?
I never used twitter anyway so idk I never got into Mastodon. Didn’t help that the few people I thought to follow basically pulled the “yeah this is cool #fucktwitter buuuuuut everyone is still on Twitter okbaiiiiiii”
I have a potentially really dumb question: how is mastodon different from the assorted lemmys and such? I originally thought mastodon was just another fediverse instance but now that I think about it I don’t think I’ve seen posts and content from others on a mastodon instance, either on .world or where I am now at .ee. is this just due to defederation with mastodon or is mastodon different in some way that I am missing?
Mastodon works more like twitter, several microblog posts that you only see if you search or check:
- Latest posts of an instance;
- The profile of the person posting;
- Posts with certain hashtags;
- Posts of people you chose to follow;
Meanwhile, lemmy works more like reddit, easier to find “specific content”, with posts neatly separated by community/instance and easier to find/search/interact with in the future. It’s less about individuals and more about communities
I think mastodon only interacts with lemmy as comments on existing posts, though there’s probably a way to post to a community from a mastodon client/site
In reality, mastodon doesn’t achieve the same dopamine hit by design. This is both a good thing (less addictive, more conversational) and a bad thing (less retention, more opaqueness in statistics) depending on why you want to use or don’t want to use social networks.
I think I’m probably closer to the normies than the stereotypical tech-literate Mastodon person.
Just from the fact that you are here, it is statistically likely that you are much closer to the tech literates than the normies. Can you search for a specific email in your email inbox? You’re already way ahead of many people. You are severely overestimating the technical literacy of normal people.
Yeah, and it’s getting worse not better.
Non-twitter is fine in any form.
Gotta disagree with you there when it comes to Threads. We have seen how Meta is also trying to influence global politics. Threads should not be encouraged either. On top of that, their privacy policy is a nightmare.
https://qz.com/threads-meta-delayed-launch-eu-privacy-policy-concerns-1850609340
Purely anecdotally from what I’ve been reading online, it seems most younger folks hate Threads.
Not necessarily because of privacy issues or social impact, mind you. They also think it just sucks to use, don’t like the UI, don’t like the content—which turned out to include a lot of people trying to build a personal brand and sell you things. Just like Instagram, where most users came from.
Excluding content details, Mastodon fails similarly. Requires learning, unsatisfactory UI, more difficult to find and engage with content you like.
Wow. Good for Bluesky.
