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.

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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.

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…

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

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