Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

Use mastodon. After all the crap that has happened recently only a fool would still use a centralized social network.

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Culture wise I’d say that Bluesky feels a lot more like Twitter immediately before Musk took over - there’s lots of shitposting & also a lot of “look at me I’m so irreverent so please follow me” vibe to it. It’s easier to find people to follow but harder to find interesting content (on mastodon you can rely on hashtags). It’s also a lot harder to get engagement if you’re not a Twitter big name, there’s a lot more parasociality going on, with more focus on individual posters than on the actual content, which IMO is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.

Mastodon users tend to feel very earnest to a fault. The whole “you forgot to add a CW to your food pic you bastard” thing is unfortunately real, but I’ve mostly stopped seeing this since I put a warning on what I will and will not CW on my timeline. On the bright side, there’s a lot more friendly engagement from strangers. Politically, mastodon users as a whole lean left with a lot of socialists/anarchists but you can curate what you see. It also depends on what circles you follow, for example, I (as a Chinese speaker) stumbled on a huge community of Chinese users who are feminist and anti-CCP, but will probably not consider themselves leftists.

As a whole, I’ve mostly abandoned Bluesky in favor of Mastodon but that’s a personal preference - both are unlikely to completely replace Twitter & the landscape will likely remain fractured for a very long time so just choose the one that vibes with you.

I like the idea of being able to following a hashtag on mastodon and have it show up in my home feed. Maybe I am just doing it wrong on BlueSky, but I couldn’t figure it out. There was something with lists, but it wasn’t working like I expected.

If you like Twitter before elon musk, bluesky is the same. I didn’t like Twitter even before elon musk. It’s pretty dystopian.

Having tried both, Mastodon feels more relaxed, more polished, easy to navigate, following hashtags, & pickup where you left off… Bluesky is in its infancy, & will probably get better… Have a couple of invite codes if anyone wants to check it out…

Bluesky Cons: doesnt have videos or gifs. Its glitchy. Doesnt federate. Has VC funding that they will have to repay with huge interest meaning they will start the enshittificatiom process and betray users’ wants by forcing ads and other nonsense.

Bluesky Pros: the usernames system is better imo. having just one @ and working as subdomains or using your domains. In the future i can see people just placing their bsky subdomain places so you can just click it and go straight to their account where as on mastodon you list on your @user@instance.name and then they have to go to their own instance and copy paste it in search and then click follow (assuming theyre not defederated).

The custom algorithms that you can make and share is a great feature. Signing in to third party apps and other services that use bluesky (like the clubhouse type app) lets tou use your same account and you easily make different passwords for each separate app by using the official app.

More artists are going to bsky than mastodon and the main art mastodon instance is run by an admin that seems to get into a bunch of drama and defederates from other instances often and based on whims with no input from the users.

Mastodon Cons: no custom algorithms, no explore/For You feature to discover new things you’re interested in. Hashtags are ugly and its annoying to follow a hashtag and see every post in the hashtag which can easily be spammed. I would much prefer to have a chronologically order timeline that I can customize to show me a suggested post after every 4 chronological posts and have the recommendations based on by likes, users i follow’s likes, and topics I manually input that it detects using text/image recognition in the posts.

Mastodon Pros: it federates, has no VC funding, works well with Lemmy and pixelfed, community feel and less dunking for likes, lots of third party apps, AGPL, lots of forks and community development.

Cons for both: Neither are good in keeping up with realtime updates on news and breaking events like twitter was

Pros for both: open source, not fully controlled by any one person/group, no elon, no ads, no ragefarming for views and ad dollars, no shady practices like slowing down links to competitors and websites the owner doesnt like, no shadowbanning keywords from search like twitter and threads does.

I personally use Mastodon and have used it for years and I very very rarely check Bluesky anymore. I do hope mastodon adopts the custom algorithms, app passwords, and username setup from Bluesky though

NEITHER!

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