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Yes, this has absolutely been my experience too. I'm defending the protocol pretty vociferously downthread but the experience itself is exactly what you say: not the meaty tech talk I can go on Twitter or Mastodon for.

I was there for the skeets and hellthreads and whatever other meme of the day: it's pretty awful and if you're not participating, you get no likes, because the memelords are the ones racking up high scores.

No likes in themselves is not bad but they're a proxy in this case for real discussion, which is what you'd want if you're talking about React or Go or Rust or whatever.

I can confirm, Bsky is absolutely diminutive compared to even Mastodon. I've had enough productive conversations on Mastodon I now include it in my little bubble of 'social media sites where I may reach out and have a conversation with someone'.

Bsky is just... I open it and post things sometimes, but all the people I've found on it who I've followed don't even do that, so it's kinda empty (at least in the tech space).

I do like their mobile app a hundred times better than Twitter's, but ten times less than Ivory.

Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding. Having to pick a server is incompatible with the general public using it.

Bluesky is the only real contender right now. It doesn’t matter that it has a low user count. The main threat is that there’s no real incentive for people to run their own BGS. We’ll see how that pans out.

This is changing rabidly and the new onboarding flow is pretty great, perhaps you should give it another go.

People handle creating an email address just fine. There's some terminology and UX to work out but it's hardly insurmountable.

But there's no real competition to email for email.

For 'short bits of social interaction and media content sharing', there are like a dozen sites with very active userbases these days.

joinmastodon.org -> "Create account" -> Pick a server (the one extra step) -> fill in the signup form

There's one extra step, I think that's not terrible.

> Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding.

This would only slow growth, invite only is also terrible onboarding so it sort of invalidates that take.

Mastodon won't take off because it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Discoverability and fragmentation are problems that Mastodon will never be able to solve. These problems mean it's never going to be 'the place to go to figure out what is going on'. It might be the place for you to figure out what's happening in your specific interest group and that's fine but it's a different use case.

Go look at the list of servers each instance chooses not to federate with. Some of these are reasonable 'they botted us', some of them are ideological 'they are tankies', some are weirder/legal like 'they did not use the correct GDPR policy'. Some are capricious like 'fuck that homeserver admin, I just don't like them so we're not peering with them'.

I can't wrap my head around it, I know I'm a class of former Twitter user that used the service to figure out what was happening either globally or on a local scale (using geocode searches). I had follow lists on there of people in specific interest areas but I wasn't on there to be a part of a community, I do chat instead for that. I'm on Mastodon now and the people on my homeserver I think are probably all fine but I don't have a lot to relate to them about and they don't post too much about current events outside their interests. I can't just search federated messages, I can view the stream of them, but I can't search and it kills it for me.

I love the concept of federated services, I admin a matrix homeserver, but the structure of Mastodon makes it hard for me to recommend that anyone register anywhere else other than mastodon.social because homeserver admins are extremely reluctant to ban this instance permanently and if you ran your own instance there's going to be a ton of admins that just block you for X reason.

I disagree, only because I’m on Mastodon and a ton of people are missing.

A large chunk of the Apple nerd ecosystem I followed on Twitter moved, and I like that I can still follow them.

But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.

So without an invite code, and the possibility Twitter will disappear real quick, I’m left with no way to follow them and I’m just forced to miss out.

There’s no way to get a code if you don’t know someone. There is no indication when signups will open. I have no idea what my place in line is. I’m just screwed.

> But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.

What were the types of people who moved over to Bluesky?

Some of them are just less tech-y.

Mastodon can give a very poor reception. There are a lot of people who seem to consider it there and are mad other people are showing up and not following their self-imposed rules on all servers. Instantly telling people they’re doing things ‘wrong’.

The people (not many, I think, but enough) can be rude about it or downright hostile. They’re like the RMS GNU/Linux brigaders of social networks.

And they drive people away.

I’ve seen a lot of people say they don’t want to be on Twitter due to Elon actively encouraging horrible things, and Mastodon treated them (or a friend) poorly.

Even if they’ve tried both, they say Bluesky feels more like the fun old twitter, whereas Mastodon can be very serious (I’ve seen this problem too).

I sort of get the feeling Mastodon lost it’s big moment due to the behavior of many users.

I haven’t been on Bluesky. Someone gave me a code (thanks a ton!) but since signups are locked at the moment I haven’t been able to jump on.

> Since Bluesky is invite-only and there's a lot of clamoring for invite codes, it's easy to think that you're missing out if you're not a member.

Reminder that you really shouldn’t feel like this regardless of the quality.

Ostensibly they are similar but there are some old threads also about how [bluesky TOS gives license to all your content](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35755501). Also, Bluesky is run by a private company. Mastodon and Bluesky have different ideologies behind them.

It really worries me that after all this time in development, and with Twitter collapsing, they are still unable to either;

1. Open the site up

2. Implement a polished user interface (bizarrely even Truth Social looks and performs better than this)

I do not have much hope that this is going to quickly change. I think at this point, the best hope we have for a Twitter exodus is to Instagram Threads.

Have you considered making a custom feed for the HN crowd? I think there'd be a lot of interest in that. Could work similar to the What's Science feed.

This was my experience too. I just posted a comment here actually about there being no “real” content and was downvoted. What the hell? I don’t really get the vibe of the Bluesky community right now. How do you get seen or get popular? What is appropriate to talk about? It’s not fun IMO until I can get my real life friends and acquaintances on there. But why would they go? Right now it’s just a social network of 100% strangers since no one I know is there. That’s not fun. That’s crap!!

Really enjoyed reading this well written take. Thanks.

Same with nostr. Everyone's either talking about nostr or zaps/sats/other cryptocurrency bs. Shame because the protocol itself is mostly cool