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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

The Mastodon User Count account suggests there are 15M accounts on Mastodon:

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11314334534088311...

    Mastodon Users
    @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social

    15,438,893 accounts 
    +209 in the last hour
    +2,542 in the last day
    +20,162 in the last week

    Sep 15, 2024, 21:00

Of course there are differences ... I would be pleased to hear first hand descriptions of them

EDIT: I hereby withdraw everything I said about BSky. Based on the replies, clearly I'm completely wrong. I apologise for all inaccuracies.

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> Bluesky is one big shouting match with opaque algorithms partly deciding what you will see, whereas Mastodon-the-Platform is a loose alliance of multiple communities, where what you say will only be seen by people in your community

Bsky feed is chronological with optional algorithmic feeds you can choose from so this doesn't sound true. Mastodon is also chronological with trending post on the homepage. I imagine the internals of both platforms are more similar than you might imagine.

If you don't subscribe to any feeds, Bluesky is also a place where what you say will only be seen by people who follow you and people who follow those who repost your posts. Whether or not either of them is a shouting match depends a lot on your choice of who to follow.

This is not to say there aren't significant differences, many generated by the federation choices Mastodon (and Bluesky) have made, as you also noted.

Rather than misinformed dick-measuring between the two, we should be glad that the next generation of social media traffic is distributed among many services and not centralized on one that would inevitably devolve into Twitter-like patterns.

One thing I do not understand about @mastodonusercount stats is: while total number of accounts significantly increased in last year or two, 'thousand toots per hour' is still oscillating in the same range.

Mastodon seems to have a retention problem, but still has a healthy daily new user count. I noticed this back when it hit close to 2m active then slid down to 600k. If they can figure out how to fix retention then it might start growing meaningfully again.

https://fedidb.org/software/mastodon

This is nonsense. Bluesky is not a big shouting match. If you don't like the default algorithms you can pick your own, including chronological.

If this is sincerely your actual, real experience with Bluesky then you use it in a very different way from all the people who are happy with it.

To be completely fair, feed algorithms can be somewhat opaque. On the other hand, most of the feeds I follow are just picking up on keywords/emojis or include all posts from a specific list of people. So it depends to some degree on your choices.

That's true. I do wish the Discover algorithm were open, but I understand that can open it up to abuse. So far it mostly just shows me nice things. There was no point with Twitter's algorithmic feed when I could say that.

I can't speak to any secret motivations but it seems like the folks running it care about making a nice place for people to hang out. We've seen how a desire to not be evil can clash with a desire to make money, but I remain optimistic.

> the folks running it care about making a nice place for people to hang out

This is actually what I didn't like about bsky. I don't want the developer of software to inject their personal social biases into the platform, and thought one of the main points of decentralization was to mitigate this.

I was talking about UX, not moderation.

The whole comment was about how much you love the Discover algorithm because it just shows you "nice things" but ok

Mastodon is not just Mastodon alone. The network consists of something more fundamental: ActivityPub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

Similarly for Bluesky and ATProto

https://atproto.com/

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