If I wasn't on Lemmy, I wouldn't even know about Mastodon. It's not really something you hear of outside of the fediverse, in my experience. Meanwhile, BlueSky is gaining traction and talked about everywhere. Most people don't care that it's not exactly decentralized. Most of the things the users on the fediverse care about are not things the average, not-very-tech-saavy person cares about.

[–] Katzastrophe@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

Mastodon is annoyingly gatekeepy too. They are super heavy on content warnings, and tend to not play nice when someone doesn't respect those unspoken rules.

Also, servers are much more likely to defederate with each other, due to what some perceive as "minor scuffles".

All in all I understand why people prefer Bluesky over Mastodon, it's simpler and the search function isn't borked to hell and back either. Blocking is also incredibly effective on Bluesky, if you block someone neither you nor they will ever see each other's content again.

[–] glimse@lemmy.world 30 points 2 days ago

Bluesky has a good new user experience, too. Even if you do know about Mastodon, making an account is like"Welcome - figure it out, lol"

I'd bet if they went the other way, they'd get significantly fewer people signing up for the service...Steam caters to both nerds and casuals alike