Valve has created a Steam Bluesky account

You could say Bluesky is... picking up Steam, eh?

Sorry, I have no new or interesting insights to offer, I'd hope most already get what's happening, anyway.

Don't worry about not having any insights, I still valve-ued the pun.
- It's nice to see other people enjoy the pun. Would be shame for it to be left4dead
All hands on Deck.

Is bluesky really eclipsing mastodon? jeeze

In the near term of course bluesky will, it has hype, it has rich tech people on it, it has 10s of millions of investment it can throw at stuff.

This is not how Mastodon or the Fediverse grows, our growth is real, not based on hyped and marketing. People come and stay here because it is a nice place, not because it is a popular or exciting new hangout spot that all the rich cool people are going to.
- Well, I didn't stay because I couldn't figure it out unlike with Lemmy and my feed is still barely showing me anything new.
The signup process for mastodon sucks massively. Unless you're nerdy enough to sort it out, you'll give up then and there. Bluesky is very straightforward, while offering customization to those looking for a non-mainstream experience.

Same for Lemmy tbh.
- I'm not an expert but I heard languages, religions and cultures has some irrational and hard to imitate rules so that outsiders can't join in or blend easily. Is this similar? Maybe it's an advantage?
- I don't really remember signing up for mastodon so I tested it.
  
  mastodon.social -> create new account -> agree to terms -> username + email + password -> click email verification
  
  It's literally standard. Maybe in the past it was worse I vaguely remember giving up maybe a year or two before I made an account on mastodon.social.
- I just went to mastadon.social for mastadon and like the biggest national lemmy instance we have, feddit. Although I have to criticize the old instance of feddit shutting down unexpectedly and I had to migrate to a newer one.
See y’all next time everyone gets surprised and upset when their centralized social media gets bought by a conservative sycophant.

Did they not learn a damn thing?
- People are constantly say the same thing about Steam yet I don't see any kind of pushback against everyone using that platform. Yeah it'll suck when it eventually happens but that doesn't mean I should have to use a more irritating service in the interim.
Two days ago BlueSky was adding more users in an hour than Mastodon was per week.
Right? 🙄

And Valve and Steamdeck accounts.

Found Steamdeck, but I can't see a non parody Valve account - got a link/handle?

Edit: Valve Software, thank you.
- Look at the boosted posts.

I will never not read "bluesky" as "bloo-skee"

I wonder why is Mastodon is not appealing to Valve.

Reach?

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.
- 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
- 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.
- Even my parents know what blue sky is. This is from the people that were concerned that my emails wouldn't be able to find me when I moved house. Because "how would they know which house to go to now?"
  
  If even they've heard of the platform, it's reached the mass market.
Bluesky has 20x the user base (and the gap is growing wider every day).
I really enjoy Mastodon, but it seems to be too confusing with all the servers. I don’t know why, but maybe because people have been conditioned by big tech to use centralised services. Especially Gen Z that grew up with this very big tech controlled internet.
- Especially Gen Z that grew up with this very big tech controlled internet.
  
  Yep, I only 3 person IRL who know and uses Forum or Reddit.
- They could just put their own instance alive,
  not very hard for them, after they shown us what they can do,
  They can make the changes happen, they showed us already.
  
  And thoses who wants the feed, just have to subscribe.
"Why is Mastodon is not"

Basic grammar hard, apparently.
- You could point out typos and mistakes without being condescending.
Valve ceo built a billion dollars mega yacht fleet off selling proprietary games through a proprietary third party launcher. A free and open source decentralized platform does not appeal to them for obvious reasons.

So how can I follow them from Mastodon?

This is my question too. Search results turn up Bridgy Fed, but that seems to require the account you're interested in following to go through those steps, which none of the accounts I'm interested in are doing. At least the Threads POTUS account turned on federation so I can view it from Mastodon, but I suspect for the next four years, that account will be pretty quiet, and if it isn't, I'll probably want it to be.
- Unfortunately, Bridgy Fed is currently opt-in. For a Bluesky user to interact with a Mastodon user, both have to follow the Bridgy Fed account. There is ongoing discussion about Mastodon instance opt-in, and making Bluesky opt-out.
  
  I highly encourage you to participate in this conversation as a Mastodon user.
I like the OpenVibe app. That's as close as I've been able to get so far.

Why not Mastodon?

Because people moved to bluesky and not to mastodon.
- Not true, Mastodon has millions of users
Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
- Twitter was bluesky before musk bought it, federation ensures that can't easily happen to mastodon.
  
  That's it.
- Centralized and private = enshitification
  
  Self hosted and federated = not prone to enshitification
  
  Idk how simple it has to be for people but clearly I'm over estimating people
- Can you explain the benefits of the fediverse over a centralized private site to a regular person in 5-second quip that will convince them that the relative complexity of using the fediverse versus BlueSky is worth the effort?
  
  Billionares with mega yacht fleets are choosing bluesky over mastodon.
- It gives space to do servers based on specific interests if you want. I'm part of a game development server, and my "Local" tab has people on my server often talking about, and showing, things that are related to game development. And I can still follow anyone from any other Mastodon server too.
  
  If you're into video games, film, maybe a specific genre of music, you can have an instance dedicated to that. (It might already exist.) It's like a virtual neighborhood, or forum. Remember forums? Those were nice. They cultivated a sense of community which made people a little more responsible in their attitudes, it feels like. Maybe that's just nostalgia, but I like the server I'm on. It's got friendly people I can talk to without feeling the need to fill my follows with them.
- 5-second quip
  
  Someone like Musk is impossible here
  
  Freedom from tyrants, maybe
Their main business and source of money is a proprietary centralized platform. Mastodon is the opposite.
Because casual mainstream basic folk (non-techie) don't like the slight legwork you need to do and understand the Fediverse

I saw an article from Yahoo (Source: The Independent) last week about Bluesky's current success from Xitter refugees and it also listed other similar groups like Mastedon. What didn't surprise me is that they said Mastedon is predominantly "techie" which includes the majority of it's user base as "supernerds" with the site having the "steepest learning curve." This was an op-ed from an outsider.

Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
- Until fediverse advocates stop thinking of people as simple minded, they will never understand the steps needed to be relevant.
  
  The main advantage to Bluesky’s architecture is centralized identity and distributed components.
  
  The centralized identity is key. Unless someone figures out a way to do this in activitypub, the fediverse will remain niche.
- Accurate username
- Until Mastedon can appeal to simple minded mainstream basic folk (which is a pretty good size of netizens) it will always be a niche group.
  
  I think the bigger problem is that the tech press starts from the perspective that Mastodon and the Fediverse is just for techie nerds and then fills out the narrative with supporting details and so unless those narratives are challenged Mastodon and the Fediverse will never be for normal people because the Tech press and the money behind it won't let that narrative stick in the general public's minds.

That's great, I suppose less concentration to a single platform is a better direction.

Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky? I would imagine whatever ills plague Twitter would also eventually come to Bluesky, because people are there. And people are people. We don't seem to have a solution to the problem - which is a specific subset of people intent on harm, and allowing them direct and wholesale access to the social fabric.

So easy nowadays to fabricate rage-inducing and follower-generating bait. No time for truth and no plan to really get there. How long before we see someone take a stab at a ministry of truth?

The block function is heavily used. Whole block lists get passed around quite frequently. I've never really seen much hate on there unless I'm clicking into something obviously heated politically. Other people may have other experiences, but the current culture there is to not engage the hate farmers and just block people instead
- Which is honestly how it should be, feeding the trolls or tolerating them is detrimental to any platform, even engaging with them to correct them is giving them fuel.
  
  Reporting and blocking is the only way and have always been, I don't know what changed that people decided tolerating/engaging with them was being the better person.
- Nuclear block plus a culture of not feeding the trolls means the only toxic accounts I've run across are just a day or two old. Block and move on. The experience can only be as negative as each user lets it be.
- This has been my experience too. The community moderation tools on top of the tools available to moderate my own feed are leagues ahead of other platforms. Being able to temporarily block keywords feels really awesome in avoiding dumb shit that can blast through social media.
Is there less rage and frothing at the mouth on Bluesky?

Yes, but I think that's temporary. When you have tens of millions of users, that's inevitable. Right now a lot of people are on their honeymoon periods, but I already see sprouts of negative attitude.

Wow