It feels like a "déjà vu", reminding me of the time when Musk took over Twitter. Between then and now, lots of the people who left Twitter (then X), returned to X after some time due to their community. Now where X played a huge part in the US election and its result, we have this wave of leaving all over again.
Bluesky seems to be the new love child during this waves that we saw when Twitter was banned in Brazil or now with the influence of X on the US election. Initially I couldn't really understand why people would choose Bluesky over Mastodon, as it has kind of the same premise of origin, but after reading a few posts of people explaining themselves I can see that it's due to its familiarity and the ease of joining compared with Mastodon. Mastodon adds much more friction to the process, which I believe is a really good thing and results in smaller, closer communities.
Another kickstarter for Bluesky are these starter packs, which are essentially themed collections of accounts that can be followed with one single click, going from an empty feed, to a community filled feed in seconds. Compare that to Mastodon, where you have to literally curate your feed yourself, which takes time and effort, but again, I believe that's a good thing.
I do have a Bluesky account, but I do like Mastodon way more, so while I try to share my blog posts on both, I do enjoy following accounts on Mastodon more.
But it doesn't really matter what I personally prefer. Social networks come and go, but the only thing that we can control are our personal websites, just like Louie Mantia, Jr. puts it beautifully:
What’s happening now with social media is not unlike what happened with messaging apps in the early 00s. We had them all as protocols, and there were apps like Adium or Trillian which tried to handle them all. And— then the ones that emerged as the winners was none of them, it was new messaging services without open protocols.
I’m scared to think we’re going to get Croissant, Openvibe, Tapestry, but then... none of the current social services will prevail, leaving all of it behind.
Like all of this consolidation—even federation efforts between the current networks—could all be for nothing. It could amount to nothing. Our personal websites can still win out, because we’re in control of those. It all comes back to email and websites. Apps and services fade. It’s just a matter of time before these new ones do too. Probably!