Well yeah, let's get the Mastodon devs a cool $15 million so they can hire more devs and compete. /s

You fail to understand open source. You want it better? Get fucking involved and stop asking people who are coding for free to compete with the code of an organization that has millions in dollars backing them and a team of professional developers.

Either get involved or start dumping money into the Mastodon devs patreon accounts.

Whichever you do is way more constructive than bitching about an open source program made by volunteers and comparing it to a slick corporate product with literally millions backing it and it's development. That's just sucking corporate dick by any other name.

Further, pretty sure block lists were and are available on Mastodon.

No wonder Trump won, everyone wants to suck at the teat of the rich instead of saying "we don't need you."

Everybody on Reddit is praising all the moderation capabilities of Bluesky

Bluesky is an unmoderated space. People don't seem to know what "moderation" is anymore. It's not the ability for end users to block other end users.

block lists and starter packs

This is a bigger issue than it seems, because the people building and using the fediverse care very strongly about things like trust and consent, and so discussions around stuff like this get stifled.

It's not a technological issue with Mastodon. It's a social one, with the fediverse at large. The place is swarming with people who will openly attack you for making the place more comfortable to less technically adept users, because they themselves were bullied off of Twitter.

Like, this is the real issue the fediverse can't get traction. People will overcome other hurdles, and develop work arounds for other limitations. But being treated as unwelcome tourists by the people who are already here? No, they won't do that.

The way you can verify your user by using your own domain as a handle.

This is a core feature of the fediverse. Run your own server, use your own domain. And mastodon offers secondary validation by adding an ID string to your website that it can check and verify.

Mirroring the entire network is what makes it act like Twitter.

I'm not convinced that that's A) something we should want, and B) a fight we can win. Trying to recreate what already exists, using technology that's not really suited for it, feels like an uncanny skeuomorphism to me.

That definitely makes it accessible to newcomers. But costs are going to gatekeep smaller communities from hosting relays as the network scales. There are plenty of obscure conversations happening on the far corners of the network that don’t concern the majority, requiring a full network mirror of this activity just increases cost for minimal perceived benefit.

There does need to be some level of seeding, I think the big push for getting starter packs and the like into Mastodon is an example of that need. At the same time, it’s hard to justify spending the money on extra storage and computer just so I can see posts on furry bluesky or some other niche but highly active community.

That’s a good set of points and I agree. I am starting to think this technical difference reflects underlying social / experiential differences:

• ActivityPub “clumpy” federation (like a region of city-states) where your view of the network is based on who you and others in your instance interact with - interoperability, but not homogeneity of content or interaction
• Atproto “swarm” federation (like a pool of taxis sharing livery, with possibly-but-not-necessarily independent operators), endpoints are exchanging data to compose a single virtual platform out of replaceable interoperating parts - federated but not decentralized, having a primary network (the relay service) holding everyone’s experience together

To me the former feels like it encourages a spirit like original Internet communities (MUDs, BBSs, message boards) while the latter produces that of branded app platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat).