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The Great Desolation: Thoughts on Mastodon and Bluesky (rieck.me)
4 points by Pseudomanifold on Aug 25, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



I find myself uninterested in Bluesky, because other than the fact that it is an invite-only system which restricts network effects, Jack Dorsey is there.

Jack Dorsey mis-managed Twitter for years and has not uttered one public peep against Musk, which means that he either agrees with Musk making him a page in the same book, or the other conclusion, that he remains the same bad manager he always was, and will run Bluesky the way he ran Twitter or how X is run today.

Mastodon has its own separate issues such as the dependence on capricious and potentially volatile server operators who aren't bound by corporate standards of accountability. I have never created a Mastodon or Bluesky account. I still have a Twitter/X account and do not feel the need to delete it. I am not a heavy user of X, I do find it of value.

I was singularly unimpressed a few weeks ago when I went looking on Mastodon to view the feed of someone who writes about technology and only technology.. but there was nothing.. I was mystified.. the Mastodon server was reporting that the account was "suspended". So, unless that's the error message returned by a user shutting down their account themselves, the operator strikes again for whatever petty political reason they may have conjured up.

Neither Mastodon nor Bluesky are worth investing time in.


Dorsey is barely involved with Bluesky. I think he's more interested in Nostr these days. He's not managing anything Bluesky related. I find the community on Bluesky to be a lot less strident than Mastodon (someone called this to "shitposter to scolder" ratio which leans much higher to "scolder" on Mastodon) but agree that it is a lot emptier than X and has a lot less going on with many fewer niches.


I agree with this sorry state of affairs; it does not seem that there is a proper successor to X at the moment.


Enter in your invite code: bsky-social-ezh43-64bv2




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