In the long run it’s about the community. All the philosophical stuff people mega into Mastodon rant on about doesn’t matter to regular people if Mastodon doesn’t have the content they want.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it’s presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don’t condone Twitter’s and Facebook’s outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It’s frankly boring as shit over there.
Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it’s tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I’ve also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.
I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you’re into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it’s terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.
Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn’t get enough discussion. There’s a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It’s absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there’s a good 50% chance they’re involved somehow.
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn’t give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can’t blame them. They don’t want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I’ve only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it’s exhausting to be part of.
In addition to content itself there is also ease of finding it and how it’s presented. People on here tend to hate algorithms but honestly Mastodon never clicked for me because (when I checked it out) you were stuck with a chronological feed. I dabbled with it but like you I could never get it to serve me content I wanted the way I wanted. Algorithms can be dangerous yes and I don’t condone Twitter’s and Facebook’s outrage baiting, but Mastodon currently just seems to demand too much work out of me.
Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It’s frankly boring as shit over there.
Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it’s tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I’ve also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.
I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you’re into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it’s terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.
Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn’t get enough discussion. There’s a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It’s absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there’s a good 50% chance they’re involved somehow.
Before I hopped onto Bluesky, I was one of those fediverse evangelists trying to get my friends onto it. Except, I couldn’t give a solid answer to the fediblock problem, and my friends definitely saw right through it or were confused about it. And I can’t blame them. They don’t want to worry about federation, or whether one instance will be blocked by the other over some drama. Meanwhile since Bluesky has been opening up more, I’ve only seen the fediverse grow more toxic towards Bluesky, to the point where it’s exhausting to be part of.
Yeah the tribalism is real boring. I have no bandwidth for it.
Yep the power to choose the algorithm you want to use is so nice.
honestly i find bluesky’s feeds wayyy better than the algorithms but even what’s hot: classic and the discover feeds tend to be 90% interesting to me