Mastodon v. BlueSky for Non-techies

What is decentralized micro-blogging all about?

The arguments that Elon is actually sinking Twitter are heating up on Twitter. I myself am in a bet with a colleague that Twitter won’t last 3 weeks. I’m taking the side that Twitter will likely be fine but I welcome the efforts to shift to more decentralized social networking systems.

Everyone is asking, what will be the next big micro-blogging service if Twitter dies? Mastodon or BlueSky?

If this is your first real foray into open source, welcome. And yes, the documentation is often this sparse!

First off, Mastodon is open source and BlueSky seems to be posturing itself as open source though no one seems to know if it actually will be in the end. Only its supposed protocol as of now is claiming to be open and it is not clear if they ever intend to open source their first server applications. Having said that, it could be a real Tim Burners-Lee type moment if BlueSky pulls off a nice new open source protocol for the world to do social media across. However something to realize is most web-protocols were not invented overnight and are notoriously difficult to standardize around. This gives Mastodon a “got their first” edge but Mastodon is clunky. In Game Theory this type of circumstantial advantage would be described as a solved coordination problem because Mastodon has a bunch of people and infrastructure already using its protocol.

For Mastodon, the ugly thing is that while you no longer have to rely on the centralized Twitter to maintain your following, you do need to rely on your Mastodon provider to not make unreasonable changes to the server that provides your account. If they decide to wipe out your account the way Twitter tends to do, you have to start your following all over again from scratch on another account and different Mastodon service provider¹. And on top of that, the idea that social media is going to go from tweeting to tooting, it’s only the type of self-deprecating humor the programming geeks like myself can truly enjoy.

So given Mastodon has a head start on BlueSky, why be optimistic about BlueSky over Mastodon? BlueSky promises account portability: followers, posts, following, everything is supposed to be exportable in BlueSky making it so you can switch your account service providers whenever you want and take all your data and following, too. It also claims it is going to let users have much greater choice in the algorithms that populate their feed.

Another thing is that, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk texted before his buying Twitter about how social media really needed to be on a public blockchain so that posts could never be taken down. It has not become clear how this fits into BlueSky and Twitter. And BlueSky did start as an initiative that Twitter folks other than Jack Dorsey were involved in before Elon baught it. However, apparently Elon said the following to Jack before purchasing Twitter:

And then after a different short phone call, Jack said: “Great! Will set up. I won’t let this fail and will do whatever it takes. It’s too critical for humanity.”

1. Though I focus on Mastodon in this article it is important to realize Mastodon is actually simply just a subset of a larger set of protocols and hodgepodge of software that coalesce around the ActivityPub protocol. These other softwares include a decentralized video streaming replacement for YouTube called PeerTube. And PixelFed is a way to do social media that feels more like Instagram on the ActivityPub Protocol.