(Simply) Comparing Bluesky and Mastodon

This is a simplified comparison, and is a Work In Progress for something more complete and complex on network and infrastructural differences check here

The week after the election Bluesky quickly surpassed Mastodon's user count. Jumping to 1 million accounts made every day for over a week until settling somewhere around 25 million accounts. Entire communities flocked from the husk that used to be Twitter. Previously, Mastodon was the biggest competitor to Twitter in the 'decentralized and federated' social media space, amassing just shy of 10 million users. A question arises - what made Bluesky more preferable than Mastodon?

The answer is simple: it felt better. It felt more seamless, and more interconnected. If you want to understand the infrastructural and network architecture better, a more advanced comparison has been provided.

But for the rest of us - Why does it feel seamless? Why does it feel more interconnected? The answer lies in the centralizations Bluesky has opted into. Blueksy boasts itself as a decentralized, distributed, and federated network. But, everything that made it appealing as a Twitter replacement relates to centralizations of the network. Bluesky rolled out without the ability for individuals to self-host their own content, users were encouraged to sign up on a central service (bsky.social, which is why your default username is username.bsky.social), this immediately overcame some of Mastodon's federation "jank." They've since released the ability to self-host your own data, but hosting one's own data doesn't actually give you control over your part of the network. Instead, the network is managed by one Big Central Relay, Bluesky's team calls this The Firehose. On top of that, what you see when you log into Bluesky is managed by a Central App View (bsky.app). These three main centralizations function to produce a seamless experience for the users. They also provide Bluesky's Team with maximum control over the content of the network. They own the majority of the data you have uploaded, they own the network you have access to, and they own the feeds, the distribution of content on the network to your browser or phone app. And, since everything on Bluesky is public, you own and control nothing that you upload. You can't control your place in the network. You can't control who can see your interactions. You can't even control what feeds you have access to, without first granting power to Bluesky.

Bluesky has also boasted their "Composable Moderation" as a way to overcome the problem with Mastodon's moderation. As they put it -

Here’s the way we’re designing an open, composable labeling system for moderation:
- Anyone can define and apply “labels” to content or accounts (i.e. “spam”, “nsfw”). This is a separate service, so they do not have to run a PDS (personal data server) or a client app in order to do so.
- Labels can be automatically generated (by third-party services, or by custom algorithms) or manually generated (by admins, or by users themselves)
- Any service or person in the network can choose how these labels get used to determine the final user experience.
- On top of that, we will let users subscribe to additional sets of moderation labels that can filter out more content or accounts.

The Bluesky Team feels that this overcomes the moderation problems of both Centralized moderation decisions; for example, when Twitter bans a user, and Decentralized moderation decisions, as in Mastodon's Instance-level defederation decisions. Instead what it really does is function as a way to ensure central control over maximum content while justifying a lack of moderation altogether.

The Bluesky network is entirely public. All that would be required to sidestep every moderation tool in place is a new, third party App View of the data. Blocks could be entirely circumvented, without a user even needing to make a new account.

Mastodon, on the other hand, is truly decentralized in every place Bluesky has opted for centralizations. This does have some undesirable effects, in terms of user experience. For Mastodon admins and developers out there, it should encourage changes in certain design implementations, evolving to meet a greater need. But, as it stands, Mastodon's implementations are designed to maximize privacy, security, and lightweightedness.