Mastodon, the Only Good Choice

Zambyte

Their most valid criticism of Bluesky is essentially that they don't understand it (they quite clearly haven't tried it, but feel validated in sharing their opinion anyways). I'll share two reasons why Mastodon is not "the Only Good Choice", as someone who hosted multiple Pleroma instances for myself and others, for years. - Where do you sign up? The fact that if anyone asks this question for Mastodon, they are almost certainly not directed to a sign up page is far more friction than most people are able to allocate effort to overcome. I went out of my way to host instances so I could have an obvious answer to this question. This is far more friction than the average person would be able to allocate in order to have access to an obvious answer to this question. - Conversations are simply broken. If you communicate at all in a decentralized way, you will interact with threads where you do not see whole branches of the conversation. Not even due to defederation, just because the branch hasn't naturally federated to your instance. This is not a good social experience. I encourage people to not accept the articles shallow claims that Bluesky is not decentralized and that it would fail if the company behind it did. Just because Bluesky actually works does not mean it is backed by centralized infrastructure. The data is decentralized, and that is what matters.

yogthos

The article would've been more powerful if it focused on ActivityPub rather than presenting Mastodon as the only option. The whole benefit of having a common protocol is precisely that Mastodon isn't the only option. We have Pixelfed, Lemmy, PeerTube, Friendica, BookWyrm, Funkwhale, Pleroma, and so on. All of these platforms interoperate which means growth on any one of them grows the fediverse as a whole. This is the direct opposite dynamic from what we see with corporate platforms which compete for users and create walled gardens making it really hard to share content from one platform to another. Hence why sharing screenshots has become so common now. The beauty of the fediverse is in its interoperable design, and Mastodon is just one piece of the puzzle here.

jimmydoe

Jack Dorsey resigned from Bluesky years ago, but smart people still smell his ghost and shake their head. If Bluesky close door now and all did:plc get magically migrate to did web, Ill probably all in on atproto.

062570864389

Doesn't sound like a cult at all.

ChrisArchitect

Related: ActivityPub over ATProto https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859784