Hi everyone.
I’m new to these kinds of innovative platforms, and I’ve come across Mastodon and Bluesky in particular. I’ve realized that both use different but equally free and open-source protocols, so my question is: are there any substantial differences between the two social networks? Should I choose one over the other?
Thanks for your replies, and have a great day.
Bluesky is private, Mastodon is FOSS. Both are federated.
Yep this is the only difference. Bluesky is promoted by the business owners, so it will have more activity and probably more consistent development and support. At the same time, it is a business and enshittification axioms still apply.
Yep, Mastodon is better as a consequence
I agree, but I can understand why BlueSky is doing better. A key component of the quality of the product is the number of users. I’m not active on either of them, but I do have a Mastodon account I barely use because it feels lonely.
Popularity at the cost of ads, algorithms, and corpo censorship isn’t something I am willing to trade. Though I don’t use Mastodon or Bluesky, I just use Lemmy.
Bluesky is corporate owned and operated, Mastadon is community owned and operated.
Bsky is owned by a transphobe, and funded by venture capital. Also from what I’ve heard they have the ability to ban anyone on any instance of bsky, not just the flagship one, I might be wrong on that one though.
Mastodon has its problems, but there’s a scale to it. I personally don’t care for the Mastodon software much, my own non-lemmy fedi account is on Friendica, but still.
There are other UIs available for Mastodon. It depends on the instance
Oh, there definitely are other UIs available. I’ve used a lot of them, and I do have a mastodon account. It just doesn’t have a lot of base features I like, plus Friendica let’s you do weird things like following RSS feeds, and posting from RSS feeds, natively, also I prefer the way replies are shown there, and I haven’t seen any mastodon clients that show them that way
Its more like Signal and Matrix. Signal is open source and centralized and Matrix is FOSS and decentralized. Bluesky is supposedly decentralized, but in practice is about as decentralized as WhatsApp which runs on decentralized technology (XMPP).
Choose Mastodon, you are asking this question on its sister platform :)
The problem with Mastodon (ActivityPub) is that your identity is held hostage by your server admin. If your instance goes down or you have a disagreement with the mod, good luck moving. You can migrate followers, but you lose all your posts and history.
ATProto fixes this by decoupling your identity from the server, you can swap servers without losing anything.
Also, Bluesky has truly customizable algorithms instead of being forced into the chronological view or whatever the instance admin decided.
Are you saying someone could keep their account even if their ATProto instance goes down? On Mastodon, you’d still get to keep the migrated followers, right? The instance maintainer would just have to announce closure in advance.
I would say the defining difference is that bluesky is not effectively a decentralized service. Federated(decentralized) social media platforms are great because it’s hard for one single company or organization to censor the entire network.
For mastodon there are some big servers but all the uses are still quite distributed. For bluesky basically all users are registered on a central server run by the company bluesky, which has sole control over what’s allowed and what’s not. This has already been used by them to censor political content.
In theory blue sky is capable of being kinda decentralized but not really and even if you were to host your own account, they would still be able to censor you.
So in simple terms it comes down to:
- Bluesky is just another twitter that will eventually go to shit like every other network (and arguably already has)
- Mastodon is here to stay and while it might be small by comparison, it will never really die or be controlled by some central entity
I’m on both. If you only want to follow techies, go with Mastodon. If you want to follow non-techies or celebrities or whatever, go with Bluesky.
