What’s the difference between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Misskey?

submitted by Kyle Judd

Back to main discussion

Avatar Jupiter Rowland

Bluesky:

  • Download official, fully featured app and not something utterly crippled
  • Looks and feels like Twitter
  • No weird tech mumbo-jumbo (WTF is a server, is that like a Discord server, what's that gotta do with Twitter) confusing you because there are no instances to choose from
  • Make an account
  • UI, UX, look & feel 100%, 1:1 fully identical with immediate pre-Musk Twitter
  • No need to get used to anything because literally everything stays precisely the same as what you're used to, only that it's no longer "Twitter" or "X" or "tweets"
  • Use it literally precisely the same as Twitter
  • Pretend you're still on Twitter, it won't make a difference

If Mastodon wanted to compete with this, it would have to

  • replace its default Web UI with an even more faithful clone of the immediate pre-Musk Twitter Web UI,
  • replace its official app with something that's absolutely identical to the immediate pre-Musk Twitter app in all but name and branding
  • remove the instance chooser without introducing any other option of joining any other instance than mastodon.social
  • completely hide decentralisation and instances from newbies, ideally for a few months or years after they've joined
  • introduce a content-forwarding algorithm like the one on X, but better
  • forcibly ban Mastodon's user-grown culture and force pre-Musk Twitter culture upon everyone
  • mollycoddle its users for months or years so that Mastodon really feels like "literally Twitter without Musk" by shielding them from not only all hints that Mastodon is different, but also from the entire rest of the Fediverse
reply
3
Avatar Eibriel

Maybe wasn't that way before, but when signing up on Bluesky now you are asked to choose a instance (bsky.social being the default), and the username contains the instance name, exactly like any Fediverse account.

reply
2
Avatar Jupiter Rowland

Good to know.

Strangely, people don't seem to mind.

I guess then a key difference is that Bluesky is presented to 𝕏 users as the same kind of monolith as 𝕏 whereas Mastodon is presented to them as a huge number of instances from which they absolutely have to pick one.

reply
3