When Twitter killed its API for third-party Apps I went full in on Mastodon and that has been a great experience so far. However, I mainly interact with “tech people” over there. Most artists I followed on Twitter are not present on Mastodon and I think they never will. They might show up on Bluesky though. Therefore, I put myself on their invite list a long time ago, but unfortunately I did not get an invite so far.
Is any MPU member already active on Bluesky? What’s it like over there?
And does someone perhaps have a spare invite for me?
Why do you think they will more likely show up on Bluesky, instead of Mastodon?
Because Bluesky is apparently much more similar to Twitter (than Mastodon), so if/when Twitter finally goes down, I expect them to end up there (rumor has it that many people consider Mastodon too complicated, because they have to choose an instance/server when signing up).
However, I’m still waiting for an invite (either via their waiting list or via a Bluesky user; active users get a new invite every 2 weeks?), so I have no firsthand experience yet.
Bluesky is a simpler onboarding process for the user. You don’t need to choose a server/instance, you can search the whole experience. Bluesky claim that the service has been designed to allow federation, but they’re not allowing it yet.
Mastodon are working on improving onboarding, but your experience of the service is very much based on which instance you join, especially if you don’t know many people who are already there.
After “hunting” in vain for several days I just scored a Bluesky invite
First impression (first few minutes): indeed (more) similar to Twitter (surprisingly I see that many of the people that I interact with on Mastodon are already on Bluesky).
Apparently there’s only an iPhone App and a web page for Bluesky (no iPad App or Mac App) (there might be an Android App though). I don’t like the icon and the launch screen, but unfortunately those cannot be changed.
Thus, SkyBridge is great: a “bridge” that allows you to use Mastodon Apps (like Ivory and Mona) with Bluesky:
Don’t use social media myself, but a couple of friends who do mentioned that blocks & blocklists are public on Bluesky which made it a hard pass for them.
“Blocks are public, and blocklists (coming soon) are also public.”
I read somewhere, or maybe heard (in which case probably on ATP) that BlueSky, the app, is only a proof of concept for the social network protocol of the same name. That’s a huge reason I’m not really paying it any attention for now.
I agree most ‘norms’ are more likely to show up on BlueSky (certainly in the aviation fraternity I follow on Twitter, several are talking about BlueSky and none about Mastodon) and I think the simple reason is mainstream media/media personalities are more likely to know about it because of its founder’s relationship to Twitter.
Meanwhile my Mastodon world is slowly growing… exactly as Twitter did. I do, however, despair of the (fortunately dwindling) number of claims that Mastodon is better than Twitter because it has [insert long-time Twitter feature here that most people apparently didn’t know about].
