Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

Mastodon has more of a community feel to me, whereas Bluesky feels like the traditional “shout into a void” like Twitter is.

I use both and much prefer Mastodon. As others have said, it’s more mature and the apps (of which there are many) are more polished. Bluesky is a bit glitchy and less feature rich. In fact, you still can’t mute phrases on Bluesky, which is a deal breaker for me.

Mastodon is harder to find people due to the federated nature, although some mobile apps such as Megalodon on Android and Ice Cubes on iOS do pull follower and following lists from remote instances which makes it easier to find people.

Bluesky is more like old Twitter, and many people who I’ve followed for years are on there. Trying to out quip each other. Mastodon is more friendly and I’ve found lots of interesting people to follow.

Culture wise I’d say that Bluesky feels a lot more like Twitter immediately before Musk took over - there’s lots of shitposting & also a lot of “look at me I’m so irreverent so please follow me” vibe to it. It’s easier to find people to follow but harder to find interesting content (on mastodon you can rely on hashtags). It’s also a lot harder to get engagement if you’re not a Twitter big name, there’s a lot more parasociality going on, with more focus on individual posters than on the actual content, which IMO is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.

Mastodon users tend to feel very earnest to a fault. The whole “you forgot to add a CW to your food pic you bastard” thing is unfortunately real, but I’ve mostly stopped seeing this since I put a warning on what I will and will not CW on my timeline. On the bright side, there’s a lot more friendly engagement from strangers. Politically, mastodon users as a whole lean left with a lot of socialists/anarchists but you can curate what you see. It also depends on what circles you follow, for example, I (as a Chinese speaker) stumbled on a huge community of Chinese users who are feminist and anti-CCP, but will probably not consider themselves leftists.

As a whole, I’ve mostly abandoned Bluesky in favor of Mastodon but that’s a personal preference - both are unlikely to completely replace Twitter & the landscape will likely remain fractured for a very long time so just choose the one that vibes with you.

Bluesky Cons: doesnt have videos or gifs. Its glitchy. Doesnt federate. Has VC funding that they will have to repay with huge interest meaning they will start the enshittificatiom process and betray users’ wants by forcing ads and other nonsense.

Bluesky Pros: the usernames system is better imo. having just one @ and working as subdomains or using your domains. In the future i can see people just placing their bsky subdomain places so you can just click it and go straight to their account where as on mastodon you list on your @[email protected] and then they have to go to their own instance and copy paste it in search and then click follow (assuming theyre not defederated).

The custom algorithms that you can make and share is a great feature. Signing in to third party apps and other services that use bluesky (like the clubhouse type app) lets tou use your same account and you easily make different passwords for each separate app by using the official app.

More artists are going to bsky than mastodon and the main art mastodon instance is run by an admin that seems to get into a bunch of drama and defederates from other instances often and based on whims with no input from the users.

Mastodon Cons: no custom algorithms, no explore/For You feature to discover new things you’re interested in. Hashtags are ugly and its annoying to follow a hashtag and see every post in the hashtag which can easily be spammed. I would much prefer to have a chronologically order timeline that I can customize to show me a suggested post after every 4 chronological posts and have the recommendations based on by likes, users i follow’s likes, and topics I manually input that it detects using text/image recognition in the posts.

Mastodon Pros: it federates, has no VC funding, works well with Lemmy and pixelfed, community feel and less dunking for likes, lots of third party apps, AGPL, lots of forks and community development.

Cons for both: Neither are good in keeping up with realtime updates on news and breaking events like twitter was

Pros for both: open source, not fully controlled by any one person/group, no elon, no ads, no ragefarming for views and ad dollars, no shady practices like slowing down links to competitors and websites the owner doesnt like, no shadowbanning keywords from search like twitter and threads does.

I personally use Mastodon and have used it for years and I very very rarely check Bluesky anymore. I do hope mastodon adopts the custom algorithms, app passwords, and username setup from Bluesky though

Use mastodon. After all the crap that has happened recently only a fool would still use a centralized social network.

Now that I’ve had the chance to try both (thanks to [email protected]), I can say that Mastadon seems more familiar to me as a former Twitter user. Despite being a Twitter spinoff, Bluesky seems to be trying to reinvent the flow of things. I’m not quite sure how hashtags (or their equivalent) work there.

I’m not sure which is better yet, as I’m too new to Bluesky to really form an opinion, but those are my initial impressions.

I’d like to see the National Weather Service and local government agencies start posting to one or both though, as weather and traffic are the only reasons I look at Twitter anymore, and I’d prefer not to support it at all.

100% mastodon. bluesky is not open-source, so using it to seek refuge from twitter is like jumping from one frying pan into the next.

If you like Twitter before elon musk, bluesky is the same. I didn’t like Twitter even before elon musk. It’s pretty dystopian.

Having tried both, Mastodon feels more relaxed, more polished, easy to navigate, following hashtags, & pickup where you left off… Bluesky is in its infancy, & will probably get better… Have a couple of invite codes if anyone wants to check it out…

I like the idea of being able to following a hashtag on mastodon and have it show up in my home feed. Maybe I am just doing it wrong on BlueSky, but I couldn’t figure it out. There was something with lists, but it wasn’t working like I expected.

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I suspect that if you ask lemmy users then they will go Mastodon because we tend to go “yay federation yay” but if you surveyed the same question somewhere else you would get a different answer.

Last time I tried Twitter you still had to pay your 20c for an sms to the site to get it published, and I never tried BS or Mastodon. I did like the shortness of the sms-based microblogging platform, but it didn’t stay that way.

I was on Mastodon starting soon after Musk bought twitter, and bluesky few the last few months. Mastodon is a lot more similar to lemmy in terms of being part of the fediverse, while bluesky sort of claims to be going for a federated thing of its own but so far is pretty much just a centralized server like twitter so far. Perhaps because of that, I find bluesky a lot more engaging and more similar to pre-Musk twitter. A lot of the choices the Mastodon creators implemented were deliberately reducing virality and “one big chatroom” feel that I at least liked about twitter. I wasn’t looking for those changes, just a microblogging social network not owned by fascists.

So basically if you want something like lemmy go with Mastodon, if you want something old twitter go with bluesky.

I love Mastodon, within the first year I’ve almost got the same amount of followers as I had on Twitter in 12 years. Plus on Mastodon, the people are nicer and talk back. Twitter felt like shouting for attention.

Also, I recently found out that BlueSky has no encryption or real security and it’s designed that way. Here’s a live stream of BlueSky, no login required.