Amanda Silberling: thinking about writing about this as an interesting internet subculture conflict -- is it that mastodon users are mad that bluesky isn't on activitypub, and then bluesky users are mad that mastodon is mad? and the cultural divide of bluesky being a bit more shitposty and mastodon being more rules-y?

thinking about writing about this as an interesting internet subculture conflict -- is it that mastodon users are mad that bluesky isn't on activitypub, and then bluesky users are mad that mastodon is mad? and the cultural divide of bluesky being a bit more shitposty and mastodon being more rules-y?

man i hate the mastodon/bluesky fighting

tell me the drama and the hot goss (by that i mean, link me to discourse)

things really kicked off over the possibility of a bridge, but generally speaking there seems to be a fair amount of hostility among blueskiers towards mastodon users and vice versa

a lot of folks on bsky portraying mastodon users as HOA-style control freaks policing everyone else's posts a lot of folks on mastodon condemning bskiers for using a platform that they see as less open, likely to be enshittified, and tainted by the Dorsey connection

Seems very much like a redux of open source vs libre software. This is the year of Mastodon on the desktop!

This conflict opens the door for my own venture into this space.

what did for me was that despite months of evangelism, I was never able to get more than two people I knew to actually post to Mastodon. It was a lot easier to get friends to stick with this instead, and that was ultimately the determinant for me

Yeah, this is where the people that I actually interacted with went. (Some are still on twitter tho) Mastodon…the server I was on vanished, which, given that most of mastodon is volunteers isn’t actually all that surprising.

more of a me-specific problem, but i never got into mastodon because it felt like too much effort? when i joined, the social server was closed, so i didn't know where to go, picked a random server, then saw there was a journalism server so i went there, then everyone blocked the journalists

I stand on this: the function Mastodon was best suited to perform was actually fulfilled by Discord instead. Mastodon was never meant to be a general purpose Twitter replacement, but a way to build specifically-focused communities with a little interoperability as a treat

Yup. Lots of Mastodon users want to carve out an online experience free from corporations likes Bluesky and Threads. Which is fine and understandable, given what capital has done to the internet, but an open protocol is the wrong tool to use for it. It’s like demanding corporations don’t use email.

i get the resistance to threads (we don't need another major meta platform in our lives), but i think it's misguided for them to lump bluesky into that category just because dorsey is a funder/board member

I’m wary of Dorsey’s involvement but I agree Bluesky > Threads (which is why I’m here and not there, after all). It helps that Dorsey doesn’t seem very involved with Bluesky’s day-to-day.

It's also the ultimate FU to Dorsey to take his money and produce a site he hates...

Mastodon always feels like walking into a conversation with hardcore Linux fans, who doesn’t see how the things they like make the experience worse for most people and waive that off. For most people though…simple is better.

I get it, but I haven’t really seen much of this policing on my Mastodon feed. Obviously, I don’t specialize in spider photography or political commentary but still, the only change I ever made was an occasional content warning.

But that's already it, isn't it? The content Warning is misused to a point where it's harmful, because all content is essentially behind a content warning, whether it contains violent imagery or not. And the only way to find out is to watch the content...

lol. I have seen content warnings on food!

“All content is essentially behind a content warning?” You must be looking in very different parts of Mastodon than I have been. I don’t even think I see one content warning per day among my follows.

The most important part about building a decentralized social network with interoperability and connectability is to hate those who want to connect and oppose the connections passionately. I guess.

I'll just do whatever Jerry at Infosec decides.

It's weird to see the Balkanization before my eyes. They're both cool places with cool communities who aren't run by billionaire assholes, and I enjoy them both!

Who has time to worry about these things?

When I joined, I searched for and found an instance with a community and moderation rules I liked, and same with a client. A handful of mutuals had joined other instances, but we also found and followed each other.

For a while, everything was very pleasant and enjoyable. I also never had issued with CNs or over-policing, but I know people who experienced that.

Then the owner of my instance had a conflict over his moderation rules with some people, and when it escalated, decided it wasn’t worth it and shut down the instance. The author of my client decided to move on to other things, and my mutuals stopped posting because of lack of engagement.

i use both and from my perspective: mastodon users hate bluesky on principle bluesky users have a problem with mastodon users based on personal experience i only post totally personal and photography stuff on mastodon, no tech/biz, bc the shrieking replyguys & entitled CW demanders drove me off.

and i grew up on usenet… so it takes a LOT to drive me off.

oh i also refuse to post software design stuff there for similar reasons. my god it's like being pecked to death by angry ducks

I use both too and honestly prefer Mastodon as a whole. Sure it has crazy discovery issues and is cliquey, but for my weird hobbies it works. I do feel that Bluesky has a better chance at mass adoption though, so that is probably good. Maybe I'm the exception, but I neither love nor hate either.

I am generally anti-mastodon. I know, I know, climate change, the tundra is melting, many are thawing but trust me, this world we live in now is no fit place for fuzzy elephants. Stay extinct, my prehistoric friends.

Why anti Mastodon? Genuinely curious. I just recently started here on Bluesky and the technical side definitely seems to be much smoother…

getting my war axe... 😄

oh boy, this one's a doozy. it's scattered... here's probably the most important link

Opt-out is a terrible default and should be reconsidered · Issue #835 · snarfed/bridgy-fedgithub.com It should be pretty obvious that a decentralized network that many use specifically to not be connected to centralized networks houses mostly people who do not wish to have their posts bridged to B...

thank you! 👀

some good coverage downthread of this:

this is the funniest github issue page i have ever seen github.com/snarfed/brid...

Issues · snarfed/bridgy-fedgithub.com 🌉 A bridge between decentralized social network protocols - Issues · snarfed/bridgy-fed

and downthread of this

The reactions on Mastodon to the creation of an opt-out-only Bluesky-Mastodon bridge are pretty much exactly what you'd expect the reactions on Mastodon would be like to the creation of an opt-out-only Bluesky-Mastodon bridge

omg

Who wants to be scolded by a nerd?

If be curious how many of each group even really care about this.

One maybe overly simplistic way I like to think about the culture divide is that bluesky users fundamentally like pre-musk twitter while mastodon users don't. mastodon has a reputation for being scoldy which I think is in part because they want to create a different culture than twitter

I think that mastodon users are mad more for technical/ideological reasons and bluesky users are mad because they've had bad experiences when they've tried out mastodon

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