Is it just the momentum and word of mouth, or are there improved features as well?
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It is easier to get into. It is easier to continue with it. There is an obvious no-brainer app.
As much as people may not like to hear it Ease of use from being one centralized platform is a big factor
Just login and be done with it
You can just click Follow and start following someone. You don’t have to perform a copy-paste dance to bring the username back to your instance and do the following there.
The process got easier in mastodon 4.2.0, now you just have to type in your instance and it takes you to it directly.
Who wants to type anything?
A place where normies can feel at home, knowing that they won’t feel out of place not having a fursona or favourite Linux distribution and won’t be scolded for not using alt text or some inadvertent picoaggression. Also, the promise of clout.
What? The constant wave of fury porn and Linux propoganda spam isn’t what people join a social media platform for?!??!?
An artificial scarcity model which gets people excited over the chance to join diet twitter.
Better posts. Feeds (like categories replacing hashtags) are great.
People are happy to peddle incorrect information which is easy to find. Dorsey is on the board, but deleted his account and used Nostr and Twitter significantly more than he ever did bluesky. Cultural debt: Mastodon has the cultural debt of reply guys, FOSS bros, racism etc During the great migration a lot of minorities attempted the switch and were met with a lot of racism which was easy to hide due to PM. Mastodon also has the onboarding issues. Studies show most users are passive users of social media, they don’t want much friction just to lurk. Bluesky appealed to minorities particularly Black women very early in the process and that contributed to the growth and culture. They’ve lost some of the goodwill due to some moderation issues. But, without the cultural debt and without making decisions such as no full-text search (since changed) and no QTs, two features that benefits minorities and professionals alike turned off many. There’s also no current federation so the onboarding is simple and smooth. The culture on Mastodon based on 4 polls I’ve seen with 10k plus responses, Mastodon leans older than bluesky. Unlike what’s put out there bluesky doesn’t aim to be a Twitter replacement but more so Mastodon+. Lastly, the culture on Mastodon often takes itself too seriously while bluesky is mostly horny, crapposting, awareness raising and lots of laughs
