Be happy on social media again

This is such a weird article.

Ostensibly, it's about Bluesky, but it spends most of its length on deriding Mastodon, seemingly with other people's hearsay and tweets as the only source of (mis)information on the matter.

It doesn't seem to say much about Bluesky itself, other than marketing blurb bullet points and praise to the fame of the people behind it. It doesn't seem to me like the author knows what Bluesky is. I certainly can't figure it out myself. It all reads like a "web3" "whitepaper", except I can't figure out what token it is I'm supposed to hodl.

But hey, whatever Bluesky is, it must be better than Mastodon, because a bunch of random people, who have never used Mastodon and have no knowledge of how it works, misread the documentation, freaked themselves out on their own misunderstandings, and tweeted scary words about it. How sad.

Since Twitter was recently acquired by the wealthiest person on Earth, a 'decentralized' social network called Mastodon became especially popular amongst those willing to replace Twitter by a more sustainable app. This article aims to describe why I strongly believe that Mastodon (as it is today) wont ever be a sustainable and popular (100 M+ daily active users) alternative to social media. Apps based on the groundbreaking Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol (e.g, Bluesky) might be the solution we need.

This article is consistent with my experience.

One thing I'd add is lack of search. Many instances outright disable searching, and those that enable it have it painfully slow and/or unfederated.

I see there is a /tags/<hashtag> URL now which is fast, so at least there's that, but a few years ago when I tried it, this didn't exist. And I don't see how you can access it from the UI anyway.

The author is displeased with the sort of discussions present on networks built on a couple different technologies. Unclear how the third technology magically makes them “happy.”