I don't understand why anyone would want to make the same mistake all over again: jumping onto a private platform owned by a company inevitably results in you becoming the product sold and enshittification.
And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?
Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?
If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).
That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
Also Mastodon is on the road to enshittification since the previous CEO and founder bowed out for $1M using donations and the main instance federates with Meta's Threads.
The other instances are out of the question since one rogue instance owner can lock and shutdown that instance.
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
With this logic, Threads is the biggest 'Mastodon instance' with 500M active users monthly.
Why aren't the general public using the original first 'instance' which is Mastodon if it is just another node?
> Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
I think this is where it falls apart.
Nobody wants to waste their time host your own, moving from a rouge instance, trying to search for users to follow and the worst one:
Choosing which instance to sign up to.
It is no wonder that even Bluesky is more active than Mastodon.
If I was going to tell someone what social media to sign up to other than X, it has to be either Threads or Bluesky.
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN.
Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :)
> Europe already has an ATproto social network - Eurosky
Why is this a different network? Are Eurosky relays not indexing anything outside Eurosky?
An unfortunate step backwards. I'm cheering for Eurosky and open networks.
I thought this was a good post on the topic: [W Social is TruthSocial with a European accent.][1]
[^1]: https://wecanjustdothings.leaflet.pub/3mokohkfb4224
I don't understand why anyone would want to make the same mistake all over again: jumping onto a private platform owned by a company inevitably results in you becoming the product sold and enshittification.
We've seen it so many times.
Learn the lesson. Use Mastodon this time.
Eurosky is also an option.
But thats just the thing with atproto. The company sucks? Just move your PDS.
atproto is also open source and in my experience (solely as a user rather than a developer on the API/network) it simply works better than Mastodon.
And what is that experience of yours? Do you have experience from deployments with many independent atproto data servers and relays federating together?
Or do you have experience from bluesky, meaning you're only interacting with one central server and none of the complexities of federation come into play?
If you use bsky.app, you still see posts from other servers (Blacksky, Eurosky, W Social, and so on). But yes, by the protocol's design you're primarily interacting with one central aggregator of everything (Bluesky's AppView).
That’s like saying that someone using Google Reader doesn’t “experience federation of RSS”.
Yes, my experience using the Bluesky app includes the Bluesky app server aggregating from many independent PDS hosts (because people I follow like that). But it doesn’t show up in user experience because that’s the whole point.
And yes, I can use another aggregator instead of the Bluesky app, or even use a client which has no backend and relies on community-run Constellation index. It all roughly works the same.
Nobody important or worth following uses Mastodon.
Also Mastodon is on the road to enshittification since the previous CEO and founder bowed out for $1M using donations and the main instance federates with Meta's Threads.
The other instances are out of the question since one rogue instance owner can lock and shutdown that instance.
How can you know there's nobody worth following on Mastodon?
I was on mastodon for a year, and the only people there were other dorks looking for someone to follow on mastodon
Terry Tao, Bert Hubert, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), Bunny Huang are just a few in my feed. But Mastodon is more about peer-to-peer communication than celebrities farming engagement indeed.
No signs of enshittification either so far, barely any new features being added TBH
I am quite happy with people I follow on Mastodon. Sure, various politicians might not be there, but those are not people I want to hear from.
The rest of your comment seems to be pure speculation, so.
Threads is just another node that connects to ActivityPub, there is no "road" to enshittification.
Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
With this logic, Threads is the biggest 'Mastodon instance' with 500M active users monthly.
Why aren't the general public using the original first 'instance' which is Mastodon if it is just another node?
> Mastodon is independant, each instance manages itself, some are bad, some are good, you can even host your own, that's the power of decentralization.
I think this is where it falls apart.
Nobody wants to waste their time host your own, moving from a rouge instance, trying to search for users to follow and the worst one:
Choosing which instance to sign up to.
It is no wonder that even Bluesky is more active than Mastodon.
If I was going to tell someone what social media to sign up to other than X, it has to be either Threads or Bluesky.
Tell me you don't understand the point of Mastodon without telling me you don't understand the point of Mastodon.
There is no lesson to be learned. There are billions of noobs. There is always a cow to milk, it seems.
I'd go further - just leave social media
No, not necessarily. Mastodon is actually "social media", as opposed to twitter/X, bluewhatever, facebook, or any other commercial outlet, to be honest, all of these have become "feeds" of promoted content designed to maximize "engagement".
Mastodon is social: you follow people, you see their stuff. It's what social media used to be.
Another social network with 0 network effect and is dead on arrival. Now being closed makes it far worse than Bluesky and no better than a prototype pre-production version of Threads; with 0 users.
From [0]
> W Social unveiled at the WEF
That's everything I need to know.
[0] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/german-ceo-l...