Why I ditched Twitter for Bluesky - and hope you will, too!

Surely nothing will go wrong with THIS corporate owned walled garden.
- How any times do they have to learn the same lesson?
- Technically it's an open protocol. Whether or not any other implementations will surface remains to be seen.

I know a much better place. It is called mastodon.
- Just pointing out the author mentions they used mastodon for a time too, their argument is that bluesky interface, content and moderation are better for them.
  
  That mindset is the problem. A slightly better UX at the cost of freedom is a bad deal.
  
  I will give bluesky credit for their focus on moderation. Hopefully some of that design is cloned by the Mastodon folks sooner than later
- Yeah, I'm not a fan of the microblog format, but I'm pretty sure everyone here is going to agree that Mastodon is the superior Twitter replacement.
  
  Nope. Not at all. I very much prefer BlueSky as far as Twitter replacement goes.
- Unfortunately not. For me the main problem is discoverability. There's no recommendation algorithm except for boosts. I'm not suggesting Mastodon integrate some kind of machine learning or other advanced stuff, but number of likes from followed accounts and a threshold would be nice for a start. As it is, Mastodon is just bad for entertainment purposes. Maybe it works for other purposes, but for entertainment I'd rather have the algorithm-fuelled quote-tweet dunking on Twitter.
  
  There's the explore tab in the mastodon app that shows you trending hashtags, and recommends people to follow based off who you already follow. There's trending accounts that just post about trending items too. Use them as your algorithm.
  
  There's definitely an opportunity for someone to run their own curation service for personalized feeds based on a user's activity on other social networks.
  I tend to just check All periodically for the first couple of months and follow tags and people that suit my own interests and build my own feed from zero. But that takes effort and time, and for folks who want an option further toward the convenience end of the privacy/convenience spectrum I suspect it would be a fairly popular option.

Leaving one privately run garden for another sure seems like a choice 🤔
- It's built to be decentralized though, from what I read.
  
  Mastodon: Am I a joke to you?
  
  It's centralized. They allow federation using their own protocol.
  But all you need to know is that it's a capitalist, for-profit undertaking.
  
  When it's built around lage aggregators, running which privately is rather hard, there's a bias in favour of centralised, large operators thereof, which mitigates some of the advantages.

Now ditch that for mastodon

Mastodon is much better for that

There is another alternative to twitter
Its pretty unknown, especially on lemmy, so i dont think many people heard of it, its on something called "the fediverse" and is called "mastodon"

- Bluesky is just a lot better. I have no particular commitment to the ActivityPub protocol.

The one drawback to Bluesky’s block feature is that a user’s block lists aren’t private. Through third party apps, you can find lists of everyone anyone’s blocked. That probably won’t bother most people, but it’s a potential issue for those who worry that public block lists could be used perniciously by persistent stalkers or harassers.
The only missing function is the ability to lock your account or go private as you can on Twitter, which would let you hide your account from non-followers while still posting to folks who already follow you.
But Bluesky has gotten considerable criticism at key points over the last year and a half for failures in handling anti-Black racism in particular. Rudy Fraser wrote extensively about some of these issues along with a deep dive into his goals and challenges as the creator of the now legendary Blacksky feed in a great post a year ago.
Every time someone recommends me Bluesky, I learn something else about it that makes me never want to make an account. Any one of these three quotes should be a dealbreaker on their own

His profile is sign-in blocked.
“Public square” indeed.

- The fucking lack of site wide search is why I hate these federated services. Such a glaringly missing feature.
  
  I’d rather have a smaller but somewhat predictable group of peers I grow to somewhat respect and trust than being confronted by thousands of random strangers that are there for mere “engagemen” but not for helping each other out or saying nice things.
  
  Yeah it really makes Mastodon unusable as the "one big forum" that twitter was and bluesky is trying to be.
- Thanks, this was helpful! Sounds like I’ll pass on Bluesky!

I tried Threads and it was horrible. Honestly not using Mastodon that much. But maybe that format is just not my thing.
- See the thing is........you have to microblog like a crazed hobo yelling things into the void. It doesn't need to make sense. It's better if it DOESN'T make sense.
- Yup, I've tried Twitter and hated it. I remember when Mastodon launched, and it was described as "federated Facebook" IIRC, and now people are claiming that it's more like "federated Twitter." I hate both Facebook and Twitter, so I use neither.
  So honestly, I don't really care about Twitter/X vs BlueSky vs Mastodon, because I don't want to use any of them. Reddit/Lemmy is a much more interesting format to me TBH.
  
  I really need local interest groups. For example a local skating community or local hardware selling group - that’s only Facebook today unfortunately.
- Mbin is attempt at having both. Microblog is a bit weak tho

Bluesky is also about as dead as tumblr
I barely see anyone interacting with anything, or anyone for that matter

Another idea: ditch Twitter and learn to play the ukulele instead

How about, no