I was recently asked if I recommended moving to Mastodon or Bluesky, given that Bluesky is experiencing a big influx from X (a.k.a the big Xit) right now. I thought I’d answer here to share with a wider audience.
If you’re going to go to the effort of adding another social media platform to your portfolio, we recommend you opt for Mastodon.
The core reason for this is the same reason we advise people and organizations to set up and keep their own domain and website rather than build on something like Substack for your writing or Instagram for your business.
TL;DR: Long-term, you’ll always be thankful that you kept control over your content and your digital identity.
If you build a presence on Mastodon (compared to any other social network), you can’t be evicted; you aren’t building someone else’s wealth, power and influence; you’re not subject to someone else’s shifting policies or ownership; and you can always migrate (if necessary) on your own terms. In essence, this is like owning your own music recordings or owning real estate vs. leasing or squatting. It may not feel like it matters, but it will.
More specifically as well, the Mastodon social media model offers a more stable way for groups to communally control and shape the growth of their online community.
To wit: A Mastodon space built around Canadian politics ought to have different moderation and etiquette and participation patterns and funding and privacy than a Mastodon community built around intersectional LGBTQ issues or around regional healthcare. Bluesky, meanwhile, doesn’t and isn’t ever going to have that level of flexibility.
Short-term, we don’t discourage clients from making the move to Bluesky from The Bad Place. Momentum is definitely with Bluesky. Certainly, there are good reasons to have a presence where the largest, most active audiences are, particularly while network effects are booming (while also remaining aware of how those networks are benefitting from your labour and influence).
But long term, we’d rather see you have your eggs in your own basket.
So balance immediate outreach and audience-building against long-term strategy as you make your choice. One comparison to keep in mind might be how Apple’s growth took off when it built its own stores and stopped relying on big-box electronics stores to be its face to its customers. Territory is destiny.
Another big-picture reason we lean towards Mastodon is that it’s part of a larger social space called the fediverse, which is essentially an open social space that shares a common social protocol, and that protocol supports much more than a Twitter-like experience. (In many ways this is a parallel to the Internet itself – a set of protocols on top of which various unfettered digital services can be built.)
The fediverse is basically everything that is based on an open standard called ActivityPub, which already has a great diversity of software and services and holds a lot of future promise for fostering new tech as well.
Mastodon itself is thousands of servers and organizations, and you can host your own Mastodon instance, and that’s only one part of the fediverse.
By funding, promoting and intellectually engaging in the Mastodon ecosystem, you also help the fediverse develop, which helps foster independent, positive, thoughtful and sustainable alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, and more.
By comparison, all of Bluesky – though it promotes itself as being built on a different, highly complex open standard called the AT Protocol – currently lives on just one set of servers, run by Bluesky. You can only access Bluesky with one main app/web interface (built by Bluesky), which has one set of features. This is better than X, which is a completely walled garden, but Bluesky is not now and, I strongly believe, for reasons of funding and politics, it never will be as open as it suggests it will be.
Cory Doctorow said much of this last year, much better than me; Daring Fireball wrote in depth about Substack recently, too.
If you have questions specific to your situation or organization, reach out, and we can talk in more detail.
This is clearly a rare moment of social network realignment, and it’s important that we’re all able to make the best choices for the long term.
P.S., If this was useful, consider following OpenMedia on Mastodon and Bluesky. [Hop Studios manages their website.] OpenMedia works to keep the Internet open, affordable, and surveillance-free, by creating community-driven campaigns to engage, educate, and empower people.
