Getting to this whole thread kind of late but ...

My take on it is that for most people in the US who liked Twitter, the default Bluesky experience is (for most people) somewhat better than the default Xitter experience. The app is good. The recommended accounts are mostly recognizable names. The Discover feed is meh but the Explore page has the kinds of topics you'd expect to see on Twitter (right now it's Superman Movie, NASA, JD Vance, Nintendo Games), and then there's stuff like Feeds and Starter Packs on a range of topics.

By contrast, the default Mastodon experience (signing up on mastodon.social, using the vanilla Mastodon web UI and/or official Mastodon apps) is not. The first two recommended accounts, marked "popular on mastodon social", are nixCraft and Eugen ... not the kind of stuff most people primarily use Twitter for. Trending posts starts with a post about a test unit for a NASA system from the Apollo moon landing, and then an interesting ham radio project ... very cool, (at least to me) but again, not particularly interesting to most people. The hashtags are FotoMontag, PhotoMonday, MonochromeMonday, SilentSunday, MountainMonday ... not particularly Twitteresque. And if anybody actually looks at the numbers on the hashtags (everything other than SilentSunday is less than 100 people) ... not Twitter. The app is okay but not as good as Twitter's (or Bluesky's) (or third-party Mastodon apps, but people don't know they exist or how to find them).

And then for people who are willing to take the time to customize their experience ... it's noticeably harder to find people to follow on Mastodon. Bluesky has Feeds and Starter Packs, both of these somewhat exist in fedi but they're much harder to find than on Bluesky. I would love something on fedi like the XBlock Screenshot labeler here to let me see less of people sharing Xitter screenshots, but it doesn't exist.

Of course there's a lot more to social networking than a Twitter-like experience, and even after you've done all the customization, Bluesky's still "a better Twitter", with all of the problems of the Twitter model as well as the good things. fedi's networked-communities approach, longer and richer posts, and mix of scoped-visibility and public discussions is something different and appeals to a lot of folks either as a complement or alternative to an all-public flat microblogging social network. And the alt-text density here is so much higher than on other networks that I've heard from a lot of blind people that it really is a fundamentallytbetter experience.

Frustratingly, though, fedi really does have a lot of strengths, it just doesn't leverage them well! mastodon.social isn't a community, doesn't have longer and richer posts, and doesn't have local-only posts, so it doesn't even hint at any of these possibilities. And even for people who have an idea that these do exist, it's not at all obvious how to find a compatible good instance. So there's certainly room for improvement ...

@fancysandwiches @mackuba @edendestroyer