Graber is “optimistic about human potential, even though I’m realistic about human nature.” When Bluesky launched last year, it filled a gap that was desperately needed by people who were looking for alternatives to X, as it seemed like the ship formerly known as Twitter was possibly sinking. (Against all odds, it hasn’t yet.)
Bluesky wasn’t as confusing as Mastodon and wasn’t owned by Meta like Threads. Bluesky looks and feels much like Old Twitter.
There was only one snag: It was available as a beta launch, only with an invite code, which was initially so hard to obtain that even Joe Biden couldn’t get one. Starting Tuesday, Bluesky is finally out of “beta” and will be open to anyone — no codes needed.
Like Mastodon and Threads, Bluesky is an experiment in a new, “decentralized” way of running a social app, where users can create their own communities and moderation rules. (Bluesky also has its own moderation team.)
Jack Dorsey was involved in creating Bluesky while he was still at Twitter and now sits on its board. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation.
Ultimately, it may not be a winner-takes-all competition between these X alternatives; the new approach to social may be to exist happily in smaller pockets without needing massive scale to survive. (Although Meta certainly would love to win the battle with Threads.)
More here - https://www.businessinsider.nl/bluesky-is-finally-open-to-everyone-but-will-anyone-come-we-ask-its-ceo/
Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain, I had to try 3/4 time before I felt like I had enough info to make the correct choice, and then finding other users from my previous twitter gang was a pain, the barrier to entry is much higher than some other options.
Same as me, I have tried to join mastodon like 4 times since it launched. To me it’s still a ghost town with very little of value.
I’ve built a place I find comfortable, took a couple tries. But I have found decent content, found some of my friends from twitter, found replication bots for people I used to follow but not really interact with.
It’s not twitter, but it took me 5+ years to build out my twitter. I think over time, enough people will join defederated social media that it can be a pretty good experience if a little too much work for many. But it will take a little time.
That’s true.
What was there to figure out in your case?
Well, every instance has different mix of people interest and moderation. Which maybe I was over thinking it but it took a while to figure out where I wanted to be. And my initial experience wasn’t great. My server was way out of date, had caching issues, was slow lots of defederation and perhaps arbitrary blocking that I didn’t know was going on so I didn’t understand why it didn’t work.
I gave up and came back to a different server and it’s been good since. But, no one is switching from threads or Instagram for that experience. Or at least going to stick with it long enough to find a home.
Really? I just spun up a gotosocial instance on a VPS and was up and running in a dozen minutes. Failing that, I’d have just joined mastodon.social. Why was it a hard decision for you? As a tech person, what about “federated” was confusing? I have a second account on a spoken language-specific server, for kicks; I set both of these up within an hour of each other. I donft understand how it could be considered a hard choice.
Now, the finding people, I could understand, but since I was not on Twitter to begin with, I had nobody I cared about following. I can understand how that would be challenging, although it has nothing to do with your home server selection.
There were tools that people made that would find if the people you followed/followed you were on Mastodon and added them so the migration wasn’t quite as painful as some here have described.