Some people will never leave Twitter because it's familiar, they're an established journalist addicted to feeling important, or because they're right-wing chuds who want to see Musk and Truth Social Redux succeed.
Some will migrate to Bluesky for Twitter without Musk. Some will stick with Mastodon on principle or because it's good enough. And then there's some also rans. But I don't think Mastodon or Twitter are going anywhere anytime soon.
Twitter's entire problem is Elon Musk, the debt he saddled the company with, and the intentionally awful decisions he makes. But it still has the most users and is by far the easiest to directly monetize.
That may relegate Bluesky and Mastodon to niche platforms for people who want to avoid ads and other shit. And that could be a lot of people! But it may never dislodge Twitter from its current place of importance.
In the meantime, Bluesky is going to get attention because people are attracted to a shiny new thing and frankly, most social media users don't want to think that hard about what platform they're on.
The people who will leave Twitter typically want the alternative to be extremely Twitter-like, easy to use, with big names they're familiar with, and preferably slick to look at.
They don't care about decentralization or who owns or controls what.
Mastodon's weakness in all of this, if you want to call it that, is that it doesn't particularly care about being popular or convenient. It doesn't care if it has a bunch of celebrities. It almost doesn't want people using it at all if it changes the existing "vibe" or culture. Its longtime user base is perfectly content with its quirkiness, and the developer is disinterested in implementing features Twitter people want and expect.
That's neither good nor bad, but it reflects the fact that the average Mastodon user doesn't care about replacing Twitter and is often opposed to making it more Twitter-like, culturally and technologically, even it means driving potential users away.
Bluesky, meanwhile, is very specifically aimed at people who want a Twitter replacement, even if it's not there yet.
Regardless, this could all end with Twitter winning by default, with all of the negative political consequences that entails.
Bluesky seems to have targeted its invitation and recruitment process at popular Twitter super users, although this process was apparently easily gamed, and if it can get a critical mass to sign on and stick around, it might even succeed, leaving Twitter full of nothing but blue check Musk dittoheads.
It's definitely the best funded and organized "Twitter killer" we've seen recently.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything to Mastodon, of course, other than some people who came here to get away from Twitter may eventually migrate away. And good riddance, some would no doubt say.
Mastodon and the Fediverse may regret that attitude if -- and it's a big if, as there's no reason to trust Jack Dorsey -- Bluesky succeeds at becoming the bigger and more popular decentralized platform.
@gwynnion This has always been my frustration with #Mastodon — that its developers and community don't aspire to unseat Capitalist control of social media. They "think small," despite the huge potential #ActivityPub offered.
Had Gargron allowed for "quote toots" and popularity-sorted feeds, Mastodon would have nipped #Bluesky in the bud months ago.
Now that window has probably passed, and some VC-funded alternative protocol will overshadow it.
@donnodubus@gwynnion those features are available on other Fediverse platforms that federate with Mastodon, but you don't see people flocking to those. Because the truth is that those aren't killer features, they're just excuses.
@donnodubus the fact that they clearly and loudly communicated their desires from the jump and then refused to jump to the platforms actually offering those features shows that they don't actually want to jump and that the “clearly and loudly communicated desires” are just excuses. Unsurprising, since what's actually holding them back is that they'd have to start from scratch as nobodies, but dishonest in the claims.
It’s an open source project and #Bluesky is hardly complete.
Seems like the major “killer feature” for #Bluesky is that it just seamlessly dumps everyone into a single instance and hand-waves all the federation complexity for sometime later.
@donnodubus “Choosing the correct instance” or choosing an instance at all was the first issue encountered during the big migration phases. That was discussed, at length, for months.
#Bluesky believes in “eventual federation”, in a generous prediction of their motives, which I do not believe is actually practical. People will just largely stay on a single instance.
Messiness and finding consensus is a necessary path if any lessons from Twitter’s “downfall” are to be learned.
@donnodubus All I am saying is that, fundamentally, #Bluesky breaks no new ground and it seems that its design intent was effectively a clone of Twitter - which is immediately frictionless to many just seeking a quick "Musk free" alternative.
Fine with me, but I predict Bluesky users are running straight into the same buzzsaw.
#Mastodon and the #Fediverse, while far from ideal today on multiple levels, are at least putting the work in to change an already proven-to-be disastrous status quo.
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