TL/DR Mastodon server admins have a great amount of control on who you can follow. Searches may not find everyone due to defederation. Bluesky puts the control for this in the users' hands with more robust search and moderation tools.

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Bluesky is growing as is Threads. I've read several articles over the past week and not one stated Mastodon is gaining users.

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I've been on Mastodon for a couple of years and, for me, it's so boring. Been on Bluesky for about a week. I currently have more followers and am following more than I ever did on Mastodon.

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Mastodon was setup with the idea of users would use hashtags to find people to follow but I've noticed half the posts have no hashtags. I've also seen a lot of hashtag abuse to reach a wider audience - hashtags being added to a post that has nothing to do with the topic. An example is #privacy being added to a painting of a beach.

There are followlists (called Starter Packs) for different topics and occupations. Lawyers, teachers, privacy enthusiasts (me), AI reachers, anyone really can find a group of people to follow that share your interests. These are created by users, not the company.

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With Mastodon being federated if you block someone and they move to another server, you need to block them again. This isn't good for someone being abused by a stalker.

They don't mess around with blocking trolls "Don't feed the trolls" could be the site motto.

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You could be on a server that gets defederated or have someone blocked from your searches by the owner of your server. This will limit who you can follow.

Bluesky puts this control back in your hands. There are blocklists to make it easier to remove the maga, nazis, rightwingers, cryptobros, etc from your sight. Moderation tools are far easier to use. Muting of hashtags can be done from the Discover timeline.

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Bluesky is very left leaning which I'm not sure I like. An example, the other day there was a thread about using blocklists and a user said they are silly because you have to trust the creator of that list. Another user said talk like that will get you blocked, many people agreed with the second user. That culture worries me. BTW I agree with the first user.