I spent quite a bit of time on BlueSky for several months and found that if you’re a nobody there is close to no engagement.

@urlyman It looks to me like BS is the place to "build an audience", to perform as a big account, and to overhear conversations between "important" people. People doing single issue advocacy seem to get more of what they're personally looking for there. And they likely make more of an impact there than they would here.

I'm not looking for an audience, the big account path looks like a bad life to lead, and I'm not important. I do like chatting with people. This place is a good fit for me.

@maccruiskeen @urlyman

Came here to quote exactly this. The original is equally relevant.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!

@urlyman
This is interesting, and matches something I think about sometimes.

I've never used BlueSky, but something I perceive as a source of conflict here on Mastodon is that it seems to work better when people seek symmetrical relationships. By this I mean a relationship where the amount of following/ followers is similar, and the posts by your followers are similarly valued as the posts you yourself write. Information transfer is expected to work both ways (from followers to you and from you to your followers).

Where I see most friction is when a single person tries to establish highly asymmetrical relations, with orders of magnitude more followers than what they follow, and perceives communication as a one-way thing where they broadcast and people passively receive (which is, I presume, what works well on Bluesky?).

(.. and yes, I can see how asymmetrical relations can feed an egotistical personality).

@urlyman @kathhayhoe “I was burned by this one place that changed the algorithm overnight, so my impact collapsed and I got thousands of hateful comments… So anyway, I found this new algorithmic place…”

‍️

@urlyman well I don’t always get a ton of engagement on here so I probably won’t get any there lol

@mycos @urlyman hah, made me chuckle, particularly considering that most celebs/actors/ICE are on bluesky as well. so anti-establishment

@urlyman I’ve gotten some climate change deniers here, but compared to the large amount of people I have interacted with, it’s quite few.

@urlyman 100% agree! My experience is on Twitter not Bluesky, but I quickly learned that follower counts don't matter much on the fedi. The higher (good faith) engagement is far more satisfying than a number going up, and you don't need to be a big account to attract that.

It's also great to see how even many big accounts here have adjusted to the different vibe, and aren't snooty about talking to those with low follower counts. Prominent figures are willing to be more generous with their time.

@Dianora
i absolutely agree here
@urlyman

@dabeaz @urlyman @patrick_h_lauke

I use Mastodon in two different ways. I like to read techie stuff, so I like that a lot of the tech bloggers and magazines post links to their content. Sometimes I boost or comment on these, but I don't expect replies.

On the other hand, I enjoy posting about my own interests and boosting and commenting on other people's creative work or insights, and that's more social. I think I've only actually met one person who has an account here.

@urlyman

Democracy, the level playing field of Mastodon, ActivityPub, and Federated Social Media is a wonder, engaging thing. It's night and day the difference.

One feels as though they actually exist, are not being ignored.

Unlike teh algoriddms which erase you.

@Anne_Delong

"..use Mastodon in two different ways ...

...tech bloggers and magazines post links to their content. ... don't expect replies. [!]
...
posting about my own interests and boosting and commenting on other people's creative work or insights..."

_This is it here_, summarized. I like it that there is just a bit of cross-over too.

Sometimes I'll write stuff as replies to the former, not aimed at them as they prob dont read and less reply, but to others following. Some do tho., if it complements what they're posting.

@dabeaz @urlyman @patrick_h_lauke

@urlyman You had half the active fediverse on this thread Mr Nobody, but not of course Her Highness whose post gave rise to it [yet] ;-/

@urlyman I reckon if she made the same analysis now, she’d get very different results on Bluesky. Plenty of trolls on there now, some of them I suspect are bots.

@urlyman And funnily enough, contrary to the experiences many others report, I get far more engagement here than on Bluesky. I somehow have built up 3x the followers here.

I suspect it’s to do with the use here of hashtags here; they’re very egalitarian, anybody can use them, and strangers can find each others’ posts on the specific interest they share.

Whereas on Bluesky people are I think using feeds a lot, and I guess my posts aren’t hitting those.

@AdrianRiskin @urlyman Well,
'original' if you can reliably determine priority for her manuscript annotations, which you can't always. (sorry, I once for a job had to oversee digitizing the entire Franklin and Johnson variorum editions, so sometimes I get flashbacks).

@maccruiskeen @urlyman ah, my bad. I didn't realize that "advertise" was a textual variant. I thought you were cleverly tweaking the text to make s point contrasting BS with ad-free mastodon.

@urlyman Re: Engagement
Welcome Nobodies!

@moshimotsu @urlyman ” Following” and user-defined Lists have chronological feeds, but Bluesky also has a ”Discover” feed that I glance at every so often.

The ATproto system architecture is pluggable, so anyone can process the firehose and generate an algorithmic feed (or multiple personalized ones) that people can subscribe to; I only follow one.

The way comment propagation works here on Fedi makes the place seem smaller than it is, since you mostly don’t see others’ conversations.

@joborg @moshimotsu

Perhaps scale was the issue or maybe I just got unlucky. I wasn’t expecting loads of interest, just some discussion.

I followed plenty, made hundreds of posts and replies. Whatever the reason, I generated close to no connection. Far less than on Twitter before it