I joined recently and haven’t seen any of that. In fact it just feels like old Twitter where people are having fun instead of being pompous trolls

> When I joined it, just as when I joined Mastodon, most of what I saw was just anti-Twitter and anti-Musk content

Was this during one of the major outflow events from Twitter? If so, hardly surprising; most new arrivals would have just left Twitter and would be irritated about the whole situation. Over the last week I've noticed a good deal of that sort of content in my Discover tab, but it's largely eased off now (yesterday was probably peak leaving-Twitter day, until the next stupid Musk thing happens; today is the day that the new TOS goes into effect).

I just joined -- contrary to this, my 'Discover' feed (equiv to Twitter's 'For You') is mostly dogs and nature photos, rather than anti-Musk content.

Still not really what I'm after, but that's what the 'Following' tab is for.

I think as a site starts, you might see that, but as it matures it diversifies. Definitely on Blue Sky, which doesn't default to an algorithmic feed, what you see depends on who you follow and as more groups move there the diversity of content increases.

You can see how that's going with the Blue Sky Starter pack directory https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all which currently has over 12000 entries across a wide range of topics.

Twitter shows you what you want because you have been a long time user and have tuned the feed

Any other platform you adopt will likewise need the same tuning, and it should be no surprise that if it knows nothing about you, you will see content that is widely appealing to the rest of the community (who just left xitter)

I’m new to bluesky and am making liberal use of the “show me less of this” button as I try to discover people with reading.

It will take some time until it reads less like the front page of Reddit and more like a feed I want to engage with.

Agree. I don't understand why anyone cares. If you talk to Jack and Jill on Twitter, why does it matter if you now talk to Jack and Jill on <insert platform here>.

It's not going to change your life or any situation you are in. Nobody outside of this circle is going to care or even notice. But that's true of all these online things, petitions, social drama, and so on.

Everyday life goes on. I'm having a late breakfast. Then doing some important work.

It will take a lot to break the network effect of X, probably more so than many other platforms, because it's very detrimental to their reach (and income/revenue share) for people with a lot of followers to move. So the important people will mostly stay, and they will attract back the people who leave, we've seen this a couple of cycles. Contrast that to something like Facebook. It had large network effects too, but all it takes is a few of your best friends switching at the same time, and nobody is losing a lot of reach by leaving. So they keep posting to both, but that takes work to keep up.

I’d really recommend muting the words “Twitter”, “the bad place” and “the other place” - really makes your feed better

Yeah, ditto. "1M people" seems great but it turns out that you don't really want people who joined due to the result of an election.

I joined yesterday and was overwhelmed by the same things, but I found the mute keyword feature and with a few muted keywords, it's a lot more useful for me. No need to mass mute/block the users, just mute twitter, musk, trump

it's starting to change now - definitely give it another spin in a week or so - a lot of organic non-musk/twitter content there now

When I joined mastodon like a decade ago it was mostly "meta" content. People talking about mastodon and ActivityPub itself. It was honestly great and there were many interesting folks & nerds talking about interesting technological stuff. It was more like hacker news, unlike now. I am a bit sad that it got more popular but it's still quite good. So yeah, some people actually want "niche" content and not mainstream content.

So I've mostly sat out on social media in the past 20 years - I never hopped onto the Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, anything bandwagons - and I conclude I've been absolutely fine missing the minute-to-minute beat. I certainly have no problem keeping up with the times vs. other friends, nor have I accomplished any less, nor diversified my activities or knowledge any less.

Everything of true, lasting value gets repeated by friends in group chats (my preferred online social fix), or referenced in articles, and reaches me soon enough.

Social media is the text equivalent of mindlessly scrolling TikTok/YouTube Shorts. Can be entertaining (and entertainment is important), but is mostly just a waste of time.

Is the link correct? It's behind a login wall.

As an anecdote, an online comment responding to someone asking if their choice of server matters (e.g. if their Mastodon account would be visible to someone using another server) was roughly "no, as long as your servers federate with each other."

I would be able to parse that, but it seems rather out-of-touch for trying to attract the bulk of Twitter users. Meanwhile, Bluesky offers a de facto server with some (lesser?) amount of decentralization that's largely invisible to end users.

This is true. The trouble is, I don't see anything preventing it having all the same problems. I actually like Mastodon because it feels a bit more like the old internet. I'm thinking maybe onboarding friction is a feature not a bug.

For me Mastodon misses some common workflows I have. When I find someone interesting I like to easily see who they follow with bios and then I may follow some of those. In Twitter and Bluesky this is pretty easy, in Mastodon it's hard and has a lot of friction points.

My major reason for using it is how open the platform is. I run a community project that involves posting pictures to multiple social media sites at once. Posting to Twitter was fine up until Elon's takeover broke a bunch of things. My API access got turned on and off repeatedly for unknown reasons. Checking the Twitter forums showed that this was happening to other developers as well with little response from the team there.

Bluesky on the other hand has been open first. You can now host your own Personal Data Server (PDS) which means if you ever want to post to the network you are basically never blocked from doing so.

I kept posting on Twitter manually (along side automatic posts to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads) because people were there but with this latest shift in interest having to post manually is a pain so I'm dropping Twitter.

The main advantages are the lack of bots (for now) and the lack of the paid blue checks. The former is a major improvement because it improves the overall quality of the tweets.

I use BlueSky because others seem to be using BlueSky. I think this is the simplest and most common reason.

- No pay-for-attention model.

- Third party clients available.

- Blocklists and other more sophisticated custom moderation available.

- Threads and profiles accessible to non-logged-in people (note that you can read the linked post and its replies without being logged in; on Twitter you at minimum couldn't see the replies, and depending on the account/phase of moon might just get an error for the actual post.)

- Less deranged leadership (at least now that Dorsey has flounced off).

- Blocking works.

For a side project I created a new account on X and on Bluesky, both before the election.

Bluesky asks what my interests are. I said software engineering, science and tech. Bluesky showed a lot of posts of cool space photos.

X asks me to follow an account from a list. I chose NASA. Out of curiosity I checked out the "For you" tab on this brand new account. I did not get recommended space photos. X pushed a lot of political posts, some bordering on hate speech (one used the n-word).

I don't quite know what explains the differences between the new-account experiences, but I had a much better time on Bluesky. I don't know if this will last, or if Bluesky is destined to follow in Twitter's footsteps once more people start joining, but I think right now Bluesky is in a good spot.

It's oddly different. I think the reasons are subtle, but exist.

I know one technical difference: if someone quote-tweets to dunk on you, you can stop it.

There must be more like that, because the effect is readily noticeable.

People can't pay to force themselves to the top of the replies.

The owner of bluesky doesn't artifically inject themselves on top of your feed.

Maybe they just didn't add the functionality yet? There's another post somewhere here from someone saying that consuming the entire bluesky firehose (which I take to mean all new posts) costs them $2.50 a month.

> Maybe the world would be better if we just didn't have a service that allows everyone to shout whatever is on their mind in to the internet void?

The older I get and the more syndical I seem, the more I agree with this. The problem is its no longer just "the internet void". That would suggest that nobody ever reads some of the nonsense.

It should have been obvious though when you give everyone an opinion that their ramblings are some kind of 'insight' and should be heard. It's exhausting, I hope the next stage of social media is it's boycott.

/rant

Personally, I enjoyed old!Twitter, and am glad that there are two (or charitably three, but I don't really _get_ Threads) viable replacements. No need for you to use it, naturally, but I'm glad it's there.

Seems like many people disagree, but at least a few of us know this is correct. More people will learn the same lessons eventually, though not likely enough people to stop history from repeating.

Forums. Back to forums. Heavily administered/modded, stay on topic, small communities. No, not (sub)Reddit.

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Maybe we’re all looking for a replacement for something that can no longer exist on the Internet. Maybe we don’t miss Twitter as much as we miss the Internet of yore.

Maybe not, but worth thinking about.

Yes, it's basically Twitter without the paid blue checks.

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> I'm guessing the technical and social response to that (ignoring and blocking seems to be recommended, dunk-quoting their idiocy actively advised against) will determine the long term success as a useful site.

One thing that Bluesky has over Twitter is the first-party concept of a moderation list; people can maintain lists of accounts, and people who trust those lists can use them to mass-mute/block the people on the lists. This actually used to be a somewhat common user-driven behaviour on Twitter (I once managed to offend Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter, back when he was still a darling of the far-right, and use of mass-block-lists was the only way to remove the hordes of angry teenagers from my at-mentions), but it was always clunky due to lack of first-party support, and post-Musk it became increasingly difficult with the death of the API.

only cows don't change their mind

So you basically say: A platform where a lot of radical right people are is full of hate and verbal violence, whereas where the radical lefts are it is nice and peaceful? Shouldn't that give you something to think about ;)?

Us vs Them triggers a very strong and bonding instinct in animals.

Humans are no different.

Marketing people have been using this trick since forever.

And the two masses keep spouting and shouting their mutual hate.

I don't understand why people devote so much time and energy to this kind of fruitless behavior.

He bans journalists and others who criticise him. Why do you think he is committed to free speech, rather than speech he likes?

Can you say "cisgender" on twitter? No? Not committed to free speech.