Since Bluesky is invite-only and there's a lot of clamoring for invite codes, it's easy to think that you're missing out if you're not a member. I'd like to offer a different perspective, that most HN readers would probably be happier on Mastodon than Bluesky. In particular, Bluesky is very small, has a strange vibe, and has almost no technical content or people interested in it.
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.
Yes, this has absolutely been my experience too. I'm defending the protocol pretty vociferously downthread but the experience itself is exactly what you say: not the meaty tech talk I can go on Twitter or Mastodon for.
I was there for the skeets and hellthreads and whatever other meme of the day: it's pretty awful and if you're not participating, you get no likes, because the memelords are the ones racking up high scores.
No likes in themselves is not bad but they're a proxy in this case for real discussion, which is what you'd want if you're talking about React or Go or Rust or whatever.
I can confirm, Bsky is absolutely diminutive compared to even Mastodon. I've had enough productive conversations on Mastodon I now include it in my little bubble of 'social media sites where I may reach out and have a conversation with someone'.
Bsky is just... I open it and post things sometimes, but all the people I've found on it who I've followed don't even do that, so it's kinda empty (at least in the tech space).
I do like their mobile app a hundred times better than Twitter's, but ten times less than Ivory.
Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding. Having to pick a server is incompatible with the general public using it.
Bluesky is the only real contender right now. It doesn’t matter that it has a low user count. The main threat is that there’s no real incentive for people to run their own BGS. We’ll see how that pans out.
> Mastodon will never take off because of its fundamentally terrible onboarding.
This would only slow growth, invite only is also terrible onboarding so it sort of invalidates that take.
Mastodon won't take off because it is NOT a Twitter replacement. Discoverability and fragmentation are problems that Mastodon will never be able to solve. These problems mean it's never going to be 'the place to go to figure out what is going on'. It might be the place for you to figure out what's happening in your specific interest group and that's fine but it's a different use case.
Go look at the list of servers each instance chooses not to federate with. Some of these are reasonable 'they botted us', some of them are ideological 'they are tankies', some are weirder/legal like 'they did not use the correct GDPR policy'. Some are capricious like 'fuck that homeserver admin, I just don't like them so we're not peering with them'.
I can't wrap my head around it, I know I'm a class of former Twitter user that used the service to figure out what was happening either globally or on a local scale (using geocode searches). I had follow lists on there of people in specific interest areas but I wasn't on there to be a part of a community, I do chat instead for that. I'm on Mastodon now and the people on my homeserver I think are probably all fine but I don't have a lot to relate to them about and they don't post too much about current events outside their interests. I can't just search federated messages, I can view the stream of them, but I can't search and it kills it for me.
I love the concept of federated services, I admin a matrix homeserver, but the structure of Mastodon makes it hard for me to recommend that anyone register anywhere else other than mastodon.social because homeserver admins are extremely reluctant to ban this instance permanently and if you ran your own instance there's going to be a ton of admins that just block you for X reason.
I disagree, only because I’m on Mastodon and a ton of people are missing.
A large chunk of the Apple nerd ecosystem I followed on Twitter moved, and I like that I can still follow them.
But everyone else I followed either never moved or quickly gave up and seems to have taken up residence on Bluesky.
So without an invite code, and the possibility Twitter will disappear real quick, I’m left with no way to follow them and I’m just forced to miss out.
There’s no way to get a code if you don’t know someone. There is no indication when signups will open. I have no idea what my place in line is. I’m just screwed.
Mastodon can give a very poor reception. There are a lot of people who seem to consider it there and are mad other people are showing up and not following their self-imposed rules on all servers. Instantly telling people they’re doing things ‘wrong’.
The people (not many, I think, but enough) can be rude about it or downright hostile. They’re like the RMS GNU/Linux brigaders of social networks.
And they drive people away.
I’ve seen a lot of people say they don’t want to be on Twitter due to Elon actively encouraging horrible things, and Mastodon treated them (or a friend) poorly.
Even if they’ve tried both, they say Bluesky feels more like the fun old twitter, whereas Mastodon can be very serious (I’ve seen this problem too).
I sort of get the feeling Mastodon lost it’s big moment due to the behavior of many users.
I haven’t been on Bluesky. Someone gave me a code (thanks a ton!) but since signups are locked at the moment I haven’t been able to jump on.
Ostensibly they are similar but there are some old threads also about how [bluesky TOS gives license to all your content](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35755501). Also, Bluesky is run by a private company. Mastodon and Bluesky have different ideologies behind them.
It really worries me that after all this time in development, and with Twitter collapsing, they are still unable to either;
1. Open the site up
2. Implement a polished user interface (bizarrely even Truth Social looks and performs better than this)
I do not have much hope that this is going to quickly change. I think at this point, the best hope we have for a Twitter exodus is to Instagram Threads.
Have you considered making a custom feed for the HN crowd? I think there'd be a lot of interest in that. Could work similar to the What's Science feed.
This was my experience too. I just posted a comment here actually about there being no “real” content and was downvoted. What the hell? I don’t really get the vibe of the Bluesky community right now. How do you get seen or get popular? What is appropriate to talk about? It’s not fun IMO until I can get my real life friends and acquaintances on there. But why would they go? Right now it’s just a social network of 100% strangers since no one I know is there. That’s not fun. That’s crap!!
What's funny is that while Twitter wants you to log in and goes at great length to prevent you from reading anything when not logged in, the situation is exactly the other way round with Bluesky.
They limit who can sign in, but openly publish all data via their API.
So one could use an AT protocol client to read, or a web based client like this one:
I'm not sure where to find clear "membership" of the PBLLC but I assume they have to file paperwork showing something where they are registered. I haven't been paying too close attention but I'm sure some people are interested.
The guarantee is that the AT protocol doesn’t work that way. They literally could not, technically. You own your data, the entire protocol is built around that basic fact.
It's like insisting blockchain transactions are immutable when Etherium issues updates all the time to reverse transactions that happened due to hacks.
This is a really, really bad read. The point is that the data is built on the foundations of an enduring protocol, right now, and that if BlueSky were to pull some shenanigans it would be trivial for a user to pick up and move. The protocol provides a built-in incentive not to pull shenanigans.
Honestly, so many of the comments here are, but what if?? The what-if scenario is built-in to the design and is in fact more resilient than other protocols like ActivityPub.
I think it's important to note that 1) The AT protocol is nowhere near complete, and as far as I can tell account portability is not actually implemented yet and 2) There are no third party sites that use AT! Even if account portability existed, there's nowhere to go.
But if account portability existed and worked, imagine this scenario: Larry Ellison wakes up one day and decides that Elon is having so much fun that he wants a social media site too. The minute the sale is announced, all the account portability APIs are disabled, and the website switches to a hard login wall. They start aggressively throttling and banning users that look like scrapers. They send a DMCA takedown to archive.org, who obliges and removes the wayback copies. They disable viewing followers and following so you can't even get your graph out. Now what?
The problem of trusting someone else to host your social media page is that you have to trust them. If your answer is "Jack wouldn't sell the company", then I can't help but note that he sure sold Twitter to Elon. If your other answer is "Larry Ellison would never do something unethical and customer-hostile" then uh...
That would have to happen soon, and if it did, you'd be right. The vision of a decentralized social web would die again, and one billionaire would make another even richer. Some moaning would be had on the Internet, but the world would continue to spin.
But, if the AT protocol even makes it another ~6 months without that happening, it will become impossible. You won't need to "trust" anyone to host anything, and if you want you'll be able to take your data and go somewhere else. That's the vision, and that's so far exactly what the folks at BlueSky have been building.
So no, the answer isn't "Larry and Jack wouldn't do those things" the answer is, "They'll have to act very quickly and in ways that are completely out of character for them, not to mention the staff at BlueSky would have to all sell their souls which is also completely out of character for them as well."
But yeah, if you're a cynic I guess everything is on the table.
they could change the protocol going forward if they wanted but all of the data currently posted on the protocol from the past would still be migratable to another PDS who supports the "old" fork of ATproto. I don't think they could change all the data you already posted with a future protocol change, that's not how it works.
The DAO fork is nothing like you describe, and was a singular incident in the first major smart contract.
BTC had a similar fork in its early days to work around a bug that actually minted illegitimate coins, yet maxis sweep that under the rug.
But you knew this, you knew what the DAO fork was. You know when it happened. You knew it was the first major smart contract. You know the context it happened in. You know the community overwhelmingly supported it. You also knew it hasn’t happened since, yet you still went out and lied.
I have not looked into it very deeply yet, but as I understand the Bluesky project, this would not be as easy for Bluesky as it is for Twitter and Reddit.
You can use your own domain as your identity. Even when you use a service like bsky.app, you can use @yourdomain.com as your handle. And switch to any other service to publish under the same handle.
Anything can restrict traffic. SMTP has no lock-in and you can use your own domain, but Gmail could decide to send all your email to spam.
Anything can just start ignoring traffic and not showing content.
I remember when Google Talk used XMPP federation. Lots of people ran XMPP servers. Then Google turned off federation and only Google Talk users could chat with other Google Talk users.
Unlike email, Bluesky essentially has one service. There's no culture of openness there. It wouldn't be hard for them to decide that they'd become the single service in the future. 99% of users aren't going to leave for a different provider and they could simply black hole stuff from other providers.
I'm not saying they want to do that, but saying there's no lock-in is wrong at this point. Bluesky could shut down their ATProto entirely and just close if off and 99.9%+ of users wouldn't notice a thing.
Bluesky can only be considered open once there are many other home servers and the Bluesky home server isn't the vast majority of traffic. Let's say it's 2025 and Bluesky has 500M users and there are 10 other servers with 5,000-500,000 users. Let's say one of the alternatives seems like it might be a threat to Bluesky's business model. Bluesky simply stops sending its posts via ATProto and then users on those other servers need to migrate to Bluesky. Total lock-in. Now, if it's 2025 and Bluesky has 50M users, ATProtoX has 100M users, SkyNet has 200M users, SocialSky has 25M users, etc., then it's hard to lock someone in. Bluesky couldn't cut itself off from 85% of the network. Bluesky could cut itself off from 0.001% of the network.
Just because Bluesky is using the ATProto today doesn't mean they'll continue to. As long as Bluesky is essentially 100% of the content/users/etc., it's easy for them to pivot away from openness toward lock-in. It's only open if they can't cut others off and as long as they're the source of almost everything on the ATProto, they can always pivot away. Yes, with the ATProto you can move servers. That doesn't mean Bluesky will continue to use ATProto and have openness around posting/viewing content.
the key thing though is that the data that people post with right now on Bluesky is on ATproto, which can be migrated to another PDS without permission from your current PDS (bsky.social). so if Bluesky tried to defederate you could take your data and fuck off with it to another PDS who supports ATproto and bam, Bluesky can't do anything about it.
the only thing keeping lock-in right now is the PLC directory, which I think has plans to be owned by consortium eventually.
That doesn't seem like a mitigation to what the poster above you said, to me. It just means that if I don't like it, I don't lose my posts when I move. That's nice but it offers no guarantees in the face of a corporate actor harming the overall federation of a network.
You and others in this thread aren't grokking what this means in practice: it means that users are transparently redirected to your new home wherever you are. If a corporate juggernaut tries to harm the network, folks just pick up and move their identity. The protocol bakes in treating the provider like a dumb pipe. The protocol puts the power in the hands of the users and at any time they can just up and walk away, defeating the stickiness of the provider.
No, I definitely get that. Where your data is, or is not, has no relevance to a network member choosing to behave badly or harmfully against that network. Nor does it actually impact what they can do to the network itself. It simply provides you with durability concerning your identity.
I’m not sure how your argument serves as any counter to “VCs invest in companies to make money” except that the shell game may be one deeper in this case.
That is because Twitter’s network produces content which currently has monetary value, while bsky currently has nothing and will run the loss-leader game of converting VC cash into network (which will someday produce value) for as long as they can.
It baffles me that this pattern is not better understood in this crowd.
What is the value of the social network other than the network and the interactions it enables? I think there is a fundamental disconnect here that people keep glossing over because abstractly it seems like there must be some way to convert social networks into economic engines but because all social networks are about digital content the only point between the digital and the concrete is the advertising which is the only time social media participants actually see anything connected to any real world economics.
I'm going to make a prophetic statement and say that all digital social networks in the long run limit are not sustainable. The digital content generated on them has no real economic value and probably never will because the social connections they enable are inherently not monetizable.
There are myriad ways that networks produce value. One immediate one is attention — if you think the ability to direct attention does not have value, I suggest you try selling anything to anyone without it.
I already mentioned advertising and how it's the only real economic activity enabled by social networks. Unless Twitter enables some kind of payment processing and gives the participants the ability to actually exchange money for goods and services Twitter will continue to be an economic loss leader. Most people on social networks do not contribute to the real economy in any meaningful way.
Same logic applies to bluesky networks and servers.
I would maybe phrase it differently but I guess I don’t disagree: social networks should be publicly-owned and exist for the public good.
The reason the model runs the way it does and collapses is because we inherently understand that most communication should not be economically restricted. We don’t have a good social network because capitalism isn’t a good way to create them.
When I go to the link above, all I'm seeing is "Create an account / Sign in". No post or anything. Sure it might be accessible via API but they have the same login wall as Twitter on the website.
Thanks for this. I had never heard of blue sky. I get to the site and it says they haven’t even launched yet? Maybe an error from all the traffic. Either way, I couldn’t see anything or even sign up for the service.
It's funny? Have you not seen the same phenomenon a million times now? Every social network-y thing does this. Once they get traction, it gets closed down slowly but steadily. See facebook, twitter, reddit, instagram... whatever bluesky is, its faith is set.
Sorry, is there an actual article with a real URL somewhere? Because this just goes to a lock screen going "create an account", so either everyone who upvoted this has a bluesky account, or the post got locked down and it's no longer information. It's just a gate.
That's a great joke if you want to keep people off your platform. Then again, we can also pretend its from skeet shooting, something that happens in the sky. Still ridiculous to need a separate site to show the content of your site, though.
Uhh, going from corporate gated community where the inmates and head are wacko, to another corporate gated community sounds like.....
Well, it sounds completely stupid. Do the plebes never learn that soon enough, their own community will be sold back to them after hijacking conversation for $$$$$ ?
"We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality.
We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!"
> If it's read-only data, I feel like hug-of-death should not be the norm.
That's what PeerTube is good at. Each video has a home site and a master copy, and each watcher helps to redistribute the video. So, if your cat video goes viral, your tiny server doesn't get hugged to death. At least in theory.
This is less distributed than bittorrent or Usenet. It's just distributed caching. Only videos currently being watched are replicated.
Now, PeerTube doesn't help with discovery. PeerTube sites only list their own videos. For this to take off and replace YouTube, a discovery mechanism (what we used to call a "search engine") is needed. Those exist.[1] (There are others, but some have bad SSL cert warnings.)
If you break the problem into discovery, hosting, and caching, all three parts are tractable. And no one part has enough authority to get uppity and act like they're in charge.
A lot of people trying to sign up probably. This degrades performance of one part of the system that is generally not highly optimised. This permeates everywhere
It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. Scaling problems are good problems, solvable at the right time without the evils of premature optimization. Doing work without a need is wasted effort.
> It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight.
I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.)
But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.
It probably would, but Mastodon is now at around 13M accounts, but with ca. 3x as many instances as when it hit 10M, so it's increasingly better prepared for large user surges.
E.g. signups have hit ~6x what they were earlier today but it's still only an average of one signup per instance per hour.
Great! I’m a fan and I hope Mastodon/ActivityPub continues to grow. I just wish it wasn’t prohibitively complex/expensive to host an instance with a few thousand members.
I think Mastodon will continue to be expensive to host, as the way it's engineered is not well suited to cut costs, but I also think we'll see a lot of innovation in "slimmer" services that will be "Mastodon-compatible enough" but lighter weight. Ideally we'll eventually see some sort of standardisation of a client-server API (rather than just depending on people ad-hoc reimplementing Mastodons API), but that may take longer.
eh, I think it's arguable here that making a good experience here would really help cement people swapping over. Then again unclear if twitter is going to remove the super low limit, so people may abandon it anyway.
I think bluesky posts have always been private, at least while they are in invite-only mode. Here's what the linked skeet says:
> Our systems are currently experiencing some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic. You may notice some slowness in-app as a result. Our team is working to resolve this issue.
> You can view our system performance status here: status.bsky.app
It's hard to take this generously. What do you mean by this, specifically? Are you saying "I didn't take out a pen and sign a physical piece of paper"? Or are you saying "I didn't click anything that says "I agree to the ToS"?
What actions are you intending which you feel are enabled by not signing anything?
I did, thanks. In that case, it looks like the scraper prevailed: "The Ninth Circuit's declaration that selectively banning potential competitors from accessing and using data that is publicly available can be considered unfair competition under California law may have large implication for antitrust law."
I think you need to look deeper. The case went back to trial multiple times after that and in the last case, HiQ was found to be in the wrong.
The court ruled for hiQ and the right to do web scraping. However, the Supreme Court, based on its Van Buren v. United States decision, vacated the decision and remanded the case for further review in June 2021. In a second ruling in April 2022 the Ninth Circuit affirmed its decision. In a November 2022 ruling the Ninth Circuit ruled that hiQ had breached LinkedIn's User Agreement and a settlement agreement was reached between the two parties.[0]
Practically speaking, though, the dispute had essentially reached its logical end with the last court ruling in November – hiQ had prevailed on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) “unauthorized access” issue related to public website data but was facing a ruling that it had breached LinkedIn’s User Agreement due to its scraping and creation of fake accounts (subject to its equitable defenses).[1]
So basically, it’s not criminal under the CFAA. Thank god. But that’s just one specific law that doesn’t apply. It still is a breach of contract and various forms of damages and injunctive relief can be found against scrapers. If the two conditions are met that I wrote several posts ago, any business based on scraping sites that have the money and motivation to find relief through the courts will be untenable. That business would find that it cannot sustain itself against repeated court actions taken against it.
ToS != law, only in the very strictest naive sense. There are plenty of laws which deal with what happens once you agree to a contract and then breach the contract. Once you agree to the ToS, you have to deal with the legal framework of business law as it applies to contracts.
If, for example, OpenAI wants to scrape Twitter in violation of the ToS, Twitter could find relief in the form of “specific performance” where the court requires OpenAI to remove all that information from its training dataset and retrain ChatGPT again. Twitter could also get damages for the times that ChatGPT served customers with the infringing model. If OpenAI didn’t fully remove the data, it would be exposed to escalating damages in the form of contempt of court remedies.
With so many novel platforms popping up, I feel whelmed; is there a central place I can go that ties it all together? (Like Google reader used to be for rss)
Have another invite but I will need some time to get it from the app because it is not loading for me right now. Just email me and I will send it as soon as I get it
Again, please be responsible! The invite code is linked to me
Edit: Removed email. For everyone else who sent an email, I'll send a code along your way as soon as I get more. Do sign up for the waitlist if you can.
They're getting slammed hard, but I recommend creating an account on either http://lemmy.world or http://kbin.social. (Personally I prefer Lemmy due to it being closer to Reddit in design.)
They both run OSS Reddit clones and appear to be gaining the most traction. As a bonus, they're also interoperable with each other, and any other server that installs the software.
I like the idea of Mastadon, but it reminds me a bit of the early internet days, mostly ‘95-‘05 (which is when I feel things began their subtle shift to monolithic services).
And at those times, compare to now, there were hurdles to finding communities (discoverability) and having them interlinked in a “whole is greater than sum of parts” fashion.
I think Mastadon actually addresses a little bit of that, but also the discoverability especially is going to be difficult with the major search engines having vested interests that don’t align with surfacing results from less centralized platforms.
For example I have never once had a search return anything in the first few pages that links to a Mastadon instance, and can’t even remember that last time I had a useful result from of conversations from a traditional style forum, but I know they still exist because I can find them if I explicitly search for that sort of thing
True, though the Mastodon compatibility is a bit iffy at the moment; they use ActivityPub in sufficiently different ways that it's not really possible to meaningfully access a Lemmy community via a Mastodon client, for example. I believe if it works at all, you'll basically just see a firehose of comments/posts.
I haven't dug into the details of either protocol at all, but I hope they find a way to interoperate with ActivityPub. In the longer term we really don't want two completely isolated networks doing the same thing.
Mastodon signups are up about 6x over the last few hours, but yeah not near the level of past Elon messes yet, and the number of Mastodon instances is many times higher now than for the last major one.
Here are some invite codes. Because some people are complaining about bots to use these you should:
(1) reverse the order of the stuff before/after the hyphen (12345-67890 -> 67890-12345)
(2) add "bsky-social-" to the beginning.
Here are the codes:
45whe-qoupi
gmuxm-k6x3j
tc30d-wwpjb
tqunq-rtgar
7wecn-kfevc
I won't be online to delete these so if you use one (or try to use one and find it's done) please leave a comment to save other people from wasting time
For those looking for a code - I found a valid code in 10 mins by looking up 'bsky-social-' on Twitter and refreshing the 'Latest' tab every few secs. Got to be quick and swift, but works.
I've been looking for a invite for months — Twitter's new leadership doesn't align with my values and I feel uneasy participating there. My email is in my profile if anyone can spare an invite.
this is a public key for Nostr, for anyone else wondering if this is an encoded bluesky invite code (a friend asked me; I don't know how much time we wasted together)
so uh, thanks for that very useful and insightful comment
RFK, Jr. is a presidential candidate with nearly as much support as Biden. I'd never vote for him*, and I'm not interested in much he has to say, but everything he says is well within the (statistical) mainstream of belief.
-----
[*] I'm not voting for any relative of another president, or probably even a relative of a congressperson; though it looks like one, I like to think this isn't a banana republic. Also, RFK, Jr. was against vaccines even when they weren't lying about them, and made his "political" bones by being against windfarms.
> RFK, Jr. is a presidential candidate with nearly as much support as Biden
He's polling between 45-60 percentage points behind Biden in most national Democratic primary polling; in the few key states that already have state level polling published are mostly in the same range, though he’s only 40 points behind in one recent Wisconsin poll.
“nearly as much support as Biden” is nowhere close to the supported by evidence.
The “At” protocol is supposed to allow you to take your account elsewhere. Since you own the domain, nobody else can use it and thus you may migrate to instances owned by other corporations or by you even.
Not that this isn't nice, but won't it inevitably be the case for 99.999% of users (if they actually get to be large enough) that they reply on some other service (or BlueSky itself) to provide their @domain? I can't imagine that the full solution for account portability requires every single user to own their own domain in perpetuity.
So bluesky has been in development for 2+ years, is well funded, is invite only, has a few thousand total active users, and still can't handle the load.. Is this supposed to be the great Twitter killer?
It's shocking. I've been very optimistic because they have infinite money to throw at it, and no need for a profit. Is persistent peer-to-peer messaging just impossible to write?
The number of participants on Bluesky is small, and everyone seems to know each other. Getting even a single like on a post is an accomplishment, and getting 16 likes (I think) gets you onto What's Hot. Approximately nobody is interested in technical discussions; Mastodon is much better for that.
The vibe on Bluesky is weird. Everyone is very enthusiastic about being there, and most of the discussion is about being on Bluesky. Someone said that everyone is Extremely Online and much more interested in meta-discussion than discussion, and I'd agree. Bluesky is all about the in-jokes and memes, which turn over at a dizzying rate, much faster than even Twitter. It's a very horny place, with lots of butt photos.
I don't want to be negative about Bluesky. For people who want a tight-knit community to chat with, it's great. But don't feel like you're missing out if you don't have an invite code. (BTW, I don't have any to give out.)
Edit: I'm not hyping Mastodon here, just comparing Twitter alternatives. Unfortunately, so far I've found that Twitter is the best choice for me. I get maybe 10% of the interesting technical discussion on Mastodon that I get on Twitter. And I still don't understand how to work with the federation. There's also Newsmast, a new social app that reached out to me, but there's approximately 0 content there.
One thing I forgot to mention about Bluesky is that it looks exactly like Twitter, so much that I can forget which app I'm on. It's very different in that regard from Mastodon, which is like alternate-universe Twitter.