They glossed over the bit where you sit around waiting years for a bluesky invite because you are not cool enough.
How about quote toot?
Thse are unfair questions, because I know the answer to them, but it demonstrates why Mastodon is unfit for the kind of chatter that Twitter excelled at and Bluesky is trying to inherit. You can't overhear stuff on Mastodon, and that has two chilling factors: one, it makes it feel like a deep echoing well unless you follow everybody you might want to talk to (thus making your signal-to-noise ratio plummet; Twitter was always better with fewer follows, so long as they engaged with people you didn't follow too--Bluesky is similar), and two, it encourages reply-guying because your Very Thoughtful Response doesn't look like it's been preempted.
Bluesky owns, actually, because they get that shitposting is the fun part of social media, and they built a thing that's good for it. They've made mistakes--quite a few of them--but they have the core of something that the Mastodon developers and ActivityPub standardization folks more generally really should look at. Because, as it stands, when you evangelize for "the fediverse", you're asking people who expect one thing to come to an offering that is drastically less of That Thing (in the good ways; much less so the bad) than the one from which they left.
The thing that is, however, making Bluesky a genuinely pleasant place to hang out, even despite its size (it's getting relatively large for pleasantness!) is that the invite code system requires that, even with that large number of invite codes, somebody wants to see your posts. It is a pretty strong high-pass filter; they're just scarce enough to value giving them to folks who are going to make for interesting reading.
Unless you buy an invite code on eBay.
Edit: start on https://hamstr.to/home
Then: find people to follow. (How can I find people to follow? How can I add them to my hamster?)
See one list here: https://github.com/aitechguy/nostr-address-book Having a starting point and seeing accounts interacting it'll be easier to pick up the ones that interest you.
Check out more at https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr
I am rooting for bluesky simply because they have been making good strategic decisions like this and have actual commerical backing.
Their name itself was the first good decision they made. Wth is lemmy,nostr, mastodon. Meta gets it with "Threads" for example. It's almost like products with bad names were named by people that went "I think this sounds cool and has an interesting meaning" and stopped there without considering marketability and consumer psychology.
People will sign up or ignore your product just because of the name. Honestly, "Threads" is a better name than "bluesky" too imo. But my hope is that they test these names using large focus groups.