I don't think there is any "killer feature" we could add. Of course there is a TON of things we need to do to improve the platform. My point is that I don't think any one feature is going to make a mass migration happen. This is a game of centimeters, not meters.
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Have you seen Erin Kissane's Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn't from July 2023? It's a very good writeup of feedbackfrom Bluesky users who had tried Mastodon.
With my own network, there are a few other things I'd add.
Black people invariably cite the racism here; people who want a diverse range of perspective often cite the lack of Black people here. (This thread is a great example of the whiteness BTW -- and how that leads to a self-reinforcing cycle, because none of the responses you got before this mentioned racism or anti-Blackness.)
Women frequently mention reply-guyism issues and mansplaining
The inability to move posting history is a big deal; many people have been on one or more instances that went away (so lost their posting history) or originally signed up for an instance where it turned out the moderation wasn't that good and then discovered they couldn't move.
Not seeing the entire conversation.
Poor moderation and arbitrary defederation behavior by mods. This is a tricky one because it depends a lot on the instance, but most people are on instances that aren't particularly well-moderated, and while best practices are to give notice before defederation a handful of high-profile "oops"es are glaring exceptions.
@jdp23 I have talked to Erin about that very article. We're trying to address these issues as best we can, e.g. recently rolling out "Fetch all replies".
Our quote post work putting the comment above the quote was specifically in response to talking to Black leaders who needed this to build their community better (but still having tools to protect against dunking)
The old guard "tone police"/replyguy issues are out of our control but so frustrating.
Great to hear! When the quote post project was first announced I remember asking somebody whether you'd be getting feedback from Black users ... very glad it happened (and not surprised to hear the preference for the comment-above-the-quote, several of the use cases in https://privacy.thenexus.today/black-twitter-quoting-and-white-toxicity-on-mastodon/ really rely on that).
On the "got yelled at" factor, one opportunities for improvement is the CW implementation. This has been a a major source of conflict (often racialized) every since it was first implemented 8+ y ears ago, so it's probably worth thinking about redesigning it.
@jdp23 It's a slightly radioactive topic 😬
If you have some suggestions, I'm all ears. Most of my UX frustration is that people are basically lazy and adding CWs is just too fraught with "oops I forgot" cases to be widely used. I'm not insensitive to the concerns, just saying it's relying on compliance which usually lets you down.
One of many radioactive topics ... there's some really good analysis in https://shelraphen.com/on-content-warnings/ and the suggestions at the end could provide some paths forward (although there's some context I'll follow up with in a DM).
I also think there are cultural education opportunities both here in terms of encouraging people not to immediately react hostilely, but also encouraging people to be more open to feedback when somebody points out that it would have included a CW.
@scottjenson fwiw the beauty of Mastodon to me is that it doesn’t have to have everybody to be useful & valuable.
@armstrong If you are lucky enough to have "a tribe" here you can talk to, then of course, you're correct. I've talked to many people that can't find their tribe and having more people would help that. I'm not asking for Twitter size, but a bit bigger would help a lot of marginalized folks.
@scottjenson for sure, and to be clear I'm definitely not saying I wouldn't like there to be more folks using Mastodon... I’m just really glad that it's not a necessity the way it would be on platforms with more commercial requirements/motivations.
@scottjenson Search on mastodon is very fragmented. It's much easier to find interests or events on bluesky, and that's a big part of network growth. This is maybe not something to be fixed. Many people consider the limited discoverability of mastodon to be a feature
@scottjenson Bluesky has gained traction because corporate and user incentives align around growth metrics that drive valuations. Early employees and investors are rewarded with wealth; users are rewarded with fame. Mastodon stakeholders, by contrast, are not innovating or executing on growth strategies.
@scottjenson in my opinion, they have better marketing and onboarding. Migration is easier too due to familiar UI with X. Once there's enough cool folks hanging out, others simply follow.
Re: "what it would take to make them switch" — I'm not sure why we're focusing on making them switch? To be honest, I'm more into making people switch out from X 😬
@cheeaun
Yeah, I definitely care more about moving people off of X/Facebook/Instagram than Bluesky.
Aside from just waiting til those platforms do more invasive things, I'm not sure what can be done to convince people to move on
@tom @cheeaun All fair comments. My point wasn't meant specifically to Bluesky, it was more 'how do we get people here'. Bluesky is just doing it better than we are to be honest.
What is clear from this thread is that "federation makes everything hard" and there are a string of 'nerdy gotchas' that just make things harder. We're addressing them (like the invisible reply fix in 4.5) but there is a ways yet to go.
@scottjenson It’s the same reason that fashion trends happen. People see what is “cool” and they try to do the same.
@scottjenson I'd argue that people actually like algorithms and only being able to see a single chronological timeline is a bit of a drawback
@scottjenson at this point the key thing is really going to be size of active community. The best you can do is encouraging bridging
@scottjenson As you say it, it's a culture of figures. I saw a lot of journalists and scientists leaving Mastodon with several hundred followers, on Blsky they have 5-6 digit numbers. Their other argument was: They didn't feel welcomed (it was the 1st Twitter migration), for every little mistake they got Mastodon-plained in a quite aggressive manner how you have to behave and use the Fediverse.
For private or independent use, Mastodon is great. But if you work for a boss, an orga, or are
@scottjenson obliged to reach a certain audience, unfortunately, Mastodon is often too niche, too small yet.
Just one small example: I often talk about our museum here and get wonderful feedback from interesting people. But we are obliged to have our official museum accounts on FB and Instagram because only there we reach the regional audience, the people who really *visit* us.
Or organising protests/activism: you need the masses.
@scottjenson I found some of the user experience on common paths being needlessly confusing.
Some examples that come to mind:
- Sometimes you get a Mastodon link, but you cannot follow a person from there – you have to find that person on your instance’s UI to do it
- Video and even image uploads being strangely restricting around resolutions, and error prone.
To me, it all has a “smell” of nerdy software. That can be off-putting even to nerdy tech people, let alone non-nerdy ones.
@mwichary @scottjenson I was going to say this too.
My partner is on Mastodon (on a different instance). She asked me a couple times over the years about interacting with a post that's not on her instance.
There's a mostly hidden thing where you copy the URL and then search for it on your own instance and find it there. It's not straightforward at all.
Also, she follows a few people, but having topic following (hashtags) more obvious (easier, visibly different) might help her use it more.
@scottjenson (And as a result of narrower audience, some of the interactions can be nerdy in bad ways. Like people picking on things needlessly, or misreading social/social network cues.)
@scottjenson I know @jerry did a bunch of poking around regarding the InfoSec crowd. Jerry - I don't remember seeing one, but do you have a summary post?
@Lee_Holmes @scottjenson I have a series of anecdotes, not necessarily data. I’ve been told peoples’ reasons for leaving include:
Being harassed (one particularly high profile infosec person loved to cook and post pictures of her cooking, and she left because of relentless
harassment by people insisting she CW her food pics)
Lack of reach - just like most people are temporarily inconvenienced billionaires, many tech people are in it for the audience and the associated benefits, even if it’s unlikely they will ever achieve that level of fame
Discoverability - this has gotten much better, but search was largely nonexistent here when many people bailed and went to bsky.
Plain ole network effect - that’s where people and organizations they want to follow landed
Longevity - I’ve known many people that started out on instances that were later shut down, and many people impacted by that just don’t come back.
@scottjenson the unfortunate reason is the same as to why Linux is still not used by the majority of people on their devices.
That said, I never had a Twitter account, and I will never create an account on any social network controlled by a private company. So I'm the exception here, somehow, but for me the only reason for being on Mastodon is that it's decentralized and not controlled by a private company. I'm also not really bothered by any of the shortcomings people mentioned in the past.
I don't think there is any "killer feature" we could add. Of course there is a TON of things we need to do to improve the platform. My point is that I don't think any one feature is going to make a mass migration happen. This is a game of centimeters, not meters.
@scottjenson I don’t think Fedi need to be giant to be of value though! Sometimes smaller things are good too!
Like ☕ and Marmite, the Fediverse is very much an acquired taste an effort is needed to start appreciate.
An ever more challenging task the shorter the median attention span has been cut since the age of the Internet began.
@tsvenson I'd like to think we can lower the bar just a bit. It's never a bad idea to reduce friction.
I think so too. The thing I've been pondering with myself about is how much that bar is "the open source mindset."
In the sense that of all those who got enough of Twitter/X and Facebook looking for an alternative less toxic and tried for example Mastodon, 9/10 expected to find a Twitter clone. Couldn't grasp the decentralisation and much more. Tried Bluesky and it was easy to get going in a new "home" as in the old place...
1/2
I'm thinking back to the first eXodus waves, when Mastodon was mentioned even in traditional media as a potential X killer.
Out there in the public the mindset is very much about who will slay the dragon and win it all.
How much did that affect those who gave Mastodon and try, and then mostly got confused?
Because here we think think less in winner/looser, instead in sharing and caring, and quality before quantity. And are not controlled by techbro's with mega corporations.
2/2
@scottjenson Making it easier for people to boot up there own services and showing why you should run your own instances through Raspberry Pis and other means would be a great thing to happen, It just needs to be done in such a way that someone can run it without much knowledge about code and configuring these sorts of systems.
The other way would be discoverability, we need to make it easier for people to discover what they want instead of the spam of bots on Mastodon.social
@scottjenson One killer feature for #Mastodon would be that #newcomers could find such an easy-to-understand #guide like https://fedi.tips/ by @FediTips directly beside the join button!
Coming from a centralized platform, the biggest obstacle is to understand how this decentralised stuff works.
The offical Mastodon sites are "too tech", too complicated.
I only stayed thanks to this great guide!
@scottjenson I mentioned Mastodon to someone recently and they said they'd spoken to a huge fan of it, but they'd told her it took them two years to build their timeline up to be interesting and useful.
Algorithmic feeds are generally terrible, except for newcomers who aren't following anyone yet. I wonder if there's a middle option - a 'sandbox feed' for when you first register here that's made up off hashtags you've indicated are of interest'?
@nicol It's simply not true (two years, it took me 4 weeks). We have other helps like subscribing to your favourite topics as hashtags, we have the trending and live feeds of the instances, and even some "starter packs" or directories like @FediFollows
The problem: people don't know it, they don't know how to use this. And the best guide ever is quite hidden: https://fedi.tips/
It could be better promoted by Mastodon.
@scottjenson While it is by no means zero, my experience is that the toxicity factor in the fediverse is a fraction of those on other platforms, with Bluesky running a distant second and X somewhat further out than Mars.
That's the killer feature, and I believe it's based on moderation by humans who care about the experience here. Our vulnerability is that those human moderators burn out; that good instances shut down for lack of funding. We're going to need to work out how that becomes sustainable, how we build a culture of donating to our instances when we have the means.
I think it's going to take some time to work that out, because it's a cultural concern, not a technological one. I also think we should be patient and continue to grow organically until we're past that point, or we'll just continue to burn out admins and see good instances shut down.
@scottjenson I think the ecosystem and environment that caused people to search for other platforms away from Twitter/X has changed and evolved over the last few years. So what caused people to pick bluesky over mastodon isnt necessarily whats keeping them on bluesky and not consider switching to mastodon
@scottjenson one of the main pressure points for bluesky currently is there adherence to age verification laws, as well as content moderation guidelines. thats the main thing i could see people consider going back to mastodon for
problem is that "we make it easier to circumvent legal requirements" is in fact a good sales pitch but not a particularly great thing to say out loud as the org yourself
@laurenshof @scottjenson well, a little late for that: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/29/mastodon-says-it-doesnt-have-the-means-to-comply-with-age-verification-laws/
That said though, the real question with Mastodon and age verification is "what would age verification gate access to?", because unlike Bluesky, we don't know what is or isn't adult content, and we don't have an explicit DMs feature, which are the two things Bluesky age-gates for jurisdictions that require it.
@thisismissem @scottjenson heh yeah the "not particularly great to say out loud" was kind of a reference to that haha
@laurenshof @thisismissem @scottjenson I would also say it's becoming easier to have a home on more than one "microblogging" platform — I tend to use Mastodon as my primary a/c, but I like checking in on Bluesky for more hobby-related things (e.g. there's a good electronic music community there). I'm hoping Bridgy Fed and third-party apps that let you track across various protocols will also continue to help and improve. So I guess I see the 'winner takes all' mentality fading in social media.
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@scottjenson I think it is harder to build reach here and a lot of people want to see the follower number go up quickly.
The lack of an algo here also implies that they will get less interesting content here than elsewhere. Some people _want_ an algo (even if they say they dont).
@ike One of the clever things BlueSky did was they had a few types of "algos" you could choose from. They were simple and optional. It feels like a good compromise. One of the biggest problems with new users is finding content and this seems like a reasonable direction.
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