People are yelling past each other about Bluesky on Mastodon.
It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking you are arguing with someone when in reality you are just talking past each other, pushing on completely different things which do not intersect at all.
The pro-Bluesky people talk about how the onboarding experience and various other technical and user experience things are so much better. They sometimes say that Mastodon has missed its shot, has chosen the wrong way to support itself, and sometimes that Bluesky feels like "old Twitter" in a positive way.
The Mastodon people, in turn, talk about how strange it feels to be so enthusiastic about another venture-funded social service with no clear business model. Why would we want to abandon Mastodon for another one of those, when we are still living through just how wrong those things can go? The fact that Bluesky is not yet there provides little comfort. Also, do we need everyone to be on Mastodon? Do we need to rank social services and which ones people prefer?
The really interesting part about these types of … discussions … is of course whether people on each side realize what is going on, and whether they even hope to get a point across to the other side. I guess the blueskiers are hoping to catch the users who left Twitter for Mastodon and just did not feel at home? Perhaps? The mastodons explaining why they like Mastodon I can relate to, but they still are mostly talking past the blueskiers' points. Each side can easily read the other, go "yes, but", and repeat their own points again.
Same procedure as every year. Sigh.
I am firmly in the Mastodon camp, in case that was hard to guess. Had I not had Mastodon or something similarly decentralized to move to after Twitter, I am not sure I would have gone to a new service at all.
I might still add more services to see what they are like, but why would I like to make my primary home on a venture-controlled service again now that I have taken the step out to the open web version? It would be a bit like giving up this little website and setting up a account on wordpress.com instead. Probably a great move for many, especially if they have not had a site before, but for me it just holds no appeal.