Technology

Why switch to Mastodon when there is Misskey?

Why use Misskey when there is Hubzilla?

In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.

These who waited until the X take over to move away are simply following trends.

Guess why? /s For real, people, some of you live in a bubble...

Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it's time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.

But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don't need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn't (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.

Presumably either because they've not heard of the Fediverse, because almost nobody has, and/or because they want people to actually see what they post.

I don't understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don't want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.

That's true by and large and we also don't have enough moderators here as is.

And for reasons I don't understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don't transition to the fediverse, as if they won't bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).

Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I'm curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I'm not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.