While a lot of Europeans are flocking to Bluesky when leaving or pausing Elon Musk’s X, the European-developed social media platform Mastodon is not experiencing the same growth. Mastodon, however, lives up to a lot of European law and values but can be more challenging to join and have not been maintained properly. Here are the main differences between the two.
Mastodon and Bluesky, who both look and feel like a Twitter-experience, are both decentralised social media platforms, but they differ in several key aspects. Mastodon is a federated network of independently operated servers (also called instances or communities). Each community has its own rules and moderation policies. Bluesky also offers the opportunity to sign up to one’s own server, but that is too difficult for many, so in practice the vast majority sign up to Bluesky’s own server, giving the company the opportunity to control data and profit from it later.
Governance Structure: While Mastodon is a truely decentralised technology offered freely for everybody to use and has no central goverance, Bluesky is owned by Bluesky PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation, which can always change status and become more ‘for profit’ just like OpenAI, who is working on moving away from their non-profit status.
Technological Infrastructure: Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol, while Bluesky operates on the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol). Both platforms are open-source and allow for interoperability and user control over data, but only Mastodon enables users to store information on their own devices. Further, a lot of other providers, including MailChimp and Meta’s Threads use the same protocol so they integrate in a very fine way, and you can interact with Threads’ users via your Mastodon account. The go-to expert for this (and Mastodon in general) is Carl Heath from Sweden.
More on the tech structure here
User Experience: Bluesky gives the most Twitter-like experience, and the founder of Bluesky is also the original Twitter (now X) founder, Jack Dorsey. It is super easy to sign up, because Bluesky offers their own central server, which is used by almost everybody signing up. You can sign up on your own server, but most chose bsky.social probably not even thinking about and understanding the difference.
Mastodon also has many similarities to Twitter, but it less convenient signing up, as you have to choose a server. This is obviously a hindrance for many, but once you’ve signed up the user experience differs depending on each community (server) – what rules and moderation do they offer.
A government, a company or and organisation could thus set up its own a server (or call it social media or community) on Mastodon and make it easy and convenient for people to sign up.
Privacy: Bluesky’s privacy policy allows for the use of personal information for marketing purposes and sharing with third parties. It offers private accounts but lacks two-factor authentication. Mastodon, however, provides more robust privacy features, including two-factor authentication and instance-specific privacy policies, so no central company owner/governance can capitalise on data.
In summary, Mastodon offers more user control through its federated structure and stronger privacy features, while Bluesky aims for a more familiar user experience with much bigger opportunities for scaling and finding a profitable business model.
This is also Europe vs USA tech innovation in a nutshell.
Carl Heath, Senior Researcher and focus leader for Digital Resilience at Rise, and an advocate of Mastodon and decentralised platforms, explains that the past two years Mastodon has not been attractive enough to engage many people and the makers of ActivityPub based tools have not been enough focused on user experience and onboarding.
“While I’m sad ActivityPub did not engage enough, I do prefer BlueSky as the (so far) lesser evil of other social media,” he says. “While it is not at all as open, federated, or has a trustworthy business model, the management and its history of choices give me some hope.”
“The one thing I do find really hopeful is that BlueSky in its design has a much better take on algorithms, amplification, moderation, and data management than any service but Mastodon. The ATprotocol holds some promise too. Its early days, and could have been better. But his is better than any of the big platforms,” he says.
