Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social), page 3

Good point from @kissane.

But it’s also something I wonder over and over with Bluesky: is this the social network people on Bluesky think it will be?

Because a lot changes with decentralization.

Right now, people want pre-Elon Twitter. But once federation starts, things won’t be a walled garden anymore.

Here @kissane finally acknowledges the elephant in the room.

Right now Bluesky seems nice. Its onboarding experience is better. Search works. The community seems friendly.

But let’s not forget that Bluesky’s main purpose is to decentralize, and on that point, they haven’t done so.

Comparing Bluesky to Mastodon is almost frivolous until Bluesky goes public and allows multiple nodes to connect.

You know what? I agree with @kissane point here. Mastodon is not user-friendly.

Some of the design decisions are befuddling. For example, DMs. I’ve never seen a more confusing implementation of that feature.

However, here’s a further problem.

Every time I try to recommend a more user-friendly Fediverse app for newbies, I get, “But Mastodon is the standard.”

The problem with the Fediverse for the past 6 months has been myopia. Everything is focused on Mastodon.

This is the part of @kissane’s blog post that frustrates me the most.

People have tried to make more welcoming and more user friendly alternatives.

They’ve made alternative front ends like @elk. They’ve made clients like @ivory.

And people have made alternatives to Mastodon itself, such as #Akkoma and #Calckey.

But the choke point isn’t Mastodon. It’s that people who write blog posts like this don’t acknowledge the Fediverse beyond Mastodon.

Next, @kissane acknowledges why there’s a significant backlash to Bluesky.

She agrees this is a reasonable reaction and it’s fair.

Ironically, I think this is the weakest part of the anti-Bluesky backlash as I believe, even if Bluesky is terrible, the protocol is free and we can use it if it has something to offer.

Nobody has to use Bluesky, but we can benefit from what they build.

So @kissane has spent the bulk of her post criticizing Mastodon’s product design, talking about how Bluesky—a company with million in sees money—does it better, even though Bluesky is in beta and not nearly finished.

Now she expresses empathy for Mastodon, and the work Eugen has done over the past 6 years.

And well, I keep wondering: what would @kissane have done different if she were in Eugen’s shoes?

Only a matter of time before someone wrote an “Anti-Mastodon/Pro-Bluesky” blog post.

@kissane did just that.

Much of her criticism is legit.

However a lot of it suffers from “shiny object syndrome” and doesn’t acknowledge that Bluesky is not decentralized yet.

To which she’ll probably accuse me of being a “Linux on the desktop” guy.

But Mastodon’s problems may become Bluesky’s problems because of decentralization 🙃

https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

@fediversenews

What @kissane doesn’t acknowledge is that these are all very good reasons to critique Bluesky.

Jack Dorsey has a bad track record, and people are right to be skeptical of him.

Bluesky’s incompleteness probably means they should shut down registrations for the time being.

Bluesky’s insistence of using AT protocol really does mean that the decentralized vote is split, and we’re now in a VHS vs. Beta situation.

She presents these critiques as silly but they’re not.

First off, @kissane compares Mastodon to people who eat disgusting things because they’re ideologues who hate deviants that eat junk food.

She doesn’t exactly explain what the “junk food” is, and I feel this analogy goes nowhere.

Some might call me a “Mastodon fan”—but for a fan, I tend to critique it a lot.

Nevertheless, let me give my perspective on my “defensive maneuvering”.

Bluesky has a better onboarding experience. User friendliness, not so much. But most people forgive this because it’s in “closed beta”.

The real unease is that Bluesky is VC-funded, is following the Silicon Valley hype machine by the book, and still hasn’t decentralized.

Yeah, I’m leery. So are many others.

This absolutely happened, but I think @kissane needs to acknowledge there was a big difference between the November Twitter Migration to Mastodon, and Bluesky’s current closed beta.

For one thing, Mastodon was already decentralized and people were rushing to any server with open registrations.

Meanwhile, you have to be invited to Bluesky—and it hasn’t decentralized yet.

But also, how will Bluesky avoid this problem once it decentralizes? We don’t know.

(mastodon.social was down for an hour, so the continuation of this thread was delayed.)

When I read this from @kissane, I agree with her.

But also the words, “For now” pop into my brain over and over again.

Bluesky is easy to find people… for now.

Bluesky is easy to follow people… for now.

Bluesky is easy to participate in conversations… for now.

What happens when federation is turned on, and search has to crawl through 25,000 nodes?

We don’t know that because without federation, Bluesky’s usability should be taken with a grain of salt.

This critique of Mastodon @kissane is not just unfair, it’s completely wrong.

It’s not that Mastodon devs don’t do much. It’s that they do too much.

In addition to developing Mastodon, they run the two flagship servers—which amounts to 1.5 million accounts.

They had to fight DDoS attacks.

And they had to deal with big servers going down because of—get this—Harry Potter.

In the meantime, new feature additions to Mastodon have slowed to a crawl.

And here, @kissane provides another legit critique of Mastodon that I actually agree emphatically about.

But once Bluesky decentralizes, how will they solve this problem?

Because the core of the problem is gated communities. Once anyone can set up a server that federates with Bluesky, I guarantee that the gated communities will come.

Maybe Bluesky can learn from Mastodon’s misstep—but we don’t know until decentralization happens.

This is an interesting take from @kissane. I believe more nuance is needed.

What people on Mastodon are seeing is everyone leaving to go hop on the new shiny thing.

Enthusiasm for ActivityPub is being sucked out of the room in favour of something that hasn’t left beta and hasn’t proven to scale for federation.

And knowing what we know about Dorsey, VC funds, and hype cycles, people perceive this an existential threat to the Fediverse.

I have the opposite opinion of @kissane.

I believe Mastodon has been product designed to death. I’m not alone. There’s reason Eugen Rochko is often called “website boy”.

His product designs often result in the rest of the Fediverse being invisible to Mastodon. For example, people don’t known when someone from Friendica sends them a post because Mastodon presents their posts as “Mastodon”.

This is not an oversight. It’s a design decision.

Oh boy, I’m not sure if @kissane saw previous developments with Mastodon.

But some of the quirkiest product decisions are because Mastodon—perhaps too much—listened to user feedback about what would make the service “better”.

One thing I’ve learned about Eugen is that he’s more than willing to change Mastodon if he’s faced with criticism.

Last year, he wanted to remove DMs because people were complaining that admins could read them.

On this point, I think @kissane is too kind.

Mastodon should absolutely implement full-text search and Twitter-style quote posts. I suspect Eugen would agree as well.

But I also feel that these quirky product decisions happened in the first place because Mastodon did what their users wanted at the time.

And if Mastodon does a complete 180 degree turn here, it will alienate some of those old users.

Here @kissane has recommendations for how Mastodon can be better.

Personally, I believe that Eugen has done the best that he can considering the circumstances. Nobody could have been prepared for November’s Twitter migration.

But I agree that maybe it’s time for him to give up the “Benevolent Dictator For Life” thing. Mastodon now needs to scale for the next 90 million users, and that means needing to delegate authority.