Bit of a tangent, but this pains me every time I read this in threads.
I wanted to join Lemmy after the Reddit exodus, found out that ml was “the main one” made by the devs and joined it. Last time I carefully tried to pick an instance was Mastodon, and I hardly ever found any content. Decided to check back in the other day, and every account except for the admin’s (like less than 50) was removed for inactivity.
I’m not some far-right or Russian troll, but because most of them are on that instance everyone on it gets this reputation.
Signed, European who’s afraid that the far-right movement on his continent will turn into an ultra-far-right turbo-movement now
Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.
Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…
… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.
I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.