Just saw someone on Bluesky who made a joke about how hard it is to make an account or follow people on Mastodon, as if it's much better to have to play favorites to multiple algorithms to have your post seen

"Federation is bad because it's a bunch of small instances owned by private people who can block whole chunks of Mastodon without your input!" if I piss off the algorithm holders my posts will never be seen again

yea did you guys know I almost gave up on bluesky because my posts were getting no attention, not even when I went "fuck it" and posted porn

then I was told I was "posting wrong" and that I had to get myself added to algorithms. I did, and suddenly lo and behold my posts get 5-10 likes now

I was also told I had to follow people and talk to everyone and reply to every post I've seen, because apparently it's all algorithms and fake engagement instead of making genuine connections

I've spent quite a lot of time on bluesky now and I can tell you with confidence that it is deadass just Twitter 2

@roxy bluesky is supposed to be a federated system, they've just not released the hosting tools yet.

Looking forward to these idiots suddenly talking about how wonderful federation is when (if) that finally happens.

@Vordus they'll come up with some headass reason why their federation is "the good one" and it'll be insufferable

@roxy

i also dont think begging for an invite is exactly "easy" to make an account

@AutumnWyvern ok I'll give them that one, it's still in closed beta

but I want to know what it'll be like if they ever federate

@roxy I havnt got an account yet I have been waiting quite a while

@roxy It keeps sounding like you have to act like you're in a reasonable-sized friendly community in order for people to see you. But you're engaging with random strangers in the monolithic general community

@rockario yea it's so dumb like, I'll talk to people online, it's all cool and everything. but I'm not gonna do it if it's fake, and I'm not gonna do it just to make myself "look better"

@roxy what?! So that's how blue sky works? Not sure how that's any better. Whatever floats their boat.

@LevelUp yea it's stupid!! I'm still mad about it

I forgot to mention that every time I post an artwork I have to use special hashtags or it doesn't count

I forgot to mention in the thread that getting yourself added to algorithms is only half the battle, you also have to use special hashtags to get yourself in, or it doesn't count

and everyone is only looking at these algorithms (that are often controlled by one or a few people) so yea, you really don't stand a chance unless you're already extremely popular

@daviddd I've got invites if you want one but you're honestly not missing out on much

@roxy "Just make friends :)" is generally bad advice if someone actually needs it. It's even worse advice when it is clearly about pretending to be personable so you can have anyone care about your professional work.

@rockario people got upset when I got mad about it but I'm like, honestly I'm not really on social media much to make friends. I'm mainly just on to post my work

Mastodon is the closest I get to being chatty with people and posting what's on my mind, because this place is real

@roxy

they are working on their own distinct federation system arent they? am i remembering that right?

@AutumnWyvern yea, but we'll see if that ever materializes lmao

what timing LMAO

(I posted a smaller but similar thread to this on bluesky and I guess it made their system go 🤨 )

@roxy it's okay I'm not too bothered bout bluesky :3, I like it here

@roxy Bluesky doesn't seem appealing to me tbh. I'm on Mastodon because it isn't Twitter it's slower and I don't feel like I'm forced to post something for engagement

@roxy no free choice and no effort

@roxy bs has hashtags?

@nilsding "hashtags" they're not actually searchable or anything, but the algorithms people make are configured to pick up on anything that starts with a #, so yes and no

@roxy wild

but yeah i feel like the vibe on bs is like, unless you were already popular on twitter you don't have a chance to get connected

@nilsding yea, I notice the people talking big about bluesky were already popular on other sites, so it's like, yea of course you dont gotta worry about it you're just steamrolling through

@roxy @Vordus Account portability with posts is one thing I'll give BlueSky and ATproto's vision of federation.. if it pans out.

I have my strong doubts about whether that's worth all the other design choices in BlueSky, but if this pushes the Mastodon devs to care about post migration (regardless of how it's technically implemented), I'll be happy having that.

@digitalfox @Vordus I heard they were gonna implement post migration into mastodon?

@nilsding also this post made me realize it can be abbreviated to "BS" and that's kinda funny

@roxy it's the best abbreviation lmao

@roxy yup. i really wonder what smaller (furry) artists hope from posting on there -- literally no one else other than who's already on there can see what they post without workarounds. and whether your post is getting seen at all.... yeah.

@nilsding that reminds me of another point

another thing is like:
even if you get yourself on one of these algorithms, the big one for furries, furrylist, has almost 20k people on it. You know people are just looking at the popular furries lmao, probably have some kind of "only show posts with so many likes on" enabled (because that's a thing too)

@roxy everything I see about bluesky makes it sound like a more gross version of twitter. And I already hated how Twitter was. How is this any better?

I don't like being suppressed because I didn't algorithm hard enough. I am glad I'm not on that site.

@Nakaballooniefox yea and it's like, it's even worse because it's human owned algorithms. At least when you have to cater to a computer algorithm like, it's not biased against you specifically (besides the biases in its programming) it's not gonna say "you know what I dont like you" and take you off

@CycloneDusk I am going to remember this for later, I think this specific comparison to being frustrated one is on the wrong email will come in handy

@CycloneDusk mastodon't, using activiteez nuts lmao gottem

@roxy ah. so, literally what i had to do on twitter. “neat”.

@wak but worse!!

@roxy @wak worseat

@roxy @CycloneDusk Fediverse diz, eyes wide

@roxy "It's too hard to make an account on this competing service" says user of a social network that you're not even allowed to sign up for without an invite.

@roxy “Mastodon sucks because I have to post to humans uwu I much prefer posting to robots that control what people see”

@KolaMagpie too true though LOL

@KolaMagpie @roxy That's the cool part: You don't have to post to humans! 🐺

*woofs*

@KolaMagpie you can have that here too!

Look at botsin.space!

@SteffoSpieler hey, botsin.space hosts the best achievement of mankind: getting pictures of fluffy critters delivered to my phone every hour