What’s the difference between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Misskey?

So what I’m hearing is… Bluesky is the only one that actually has a chance of going mainstream

I don't understand why that's always true but yes
- I think it's because businesses tend to focus on super easy access, user interface and user engagement first, while open source projects tend to focus on tech and often forget about the end user experience.
  
  I guess but with mastodon I literally cannot imagine it getting any easier.
  
  Download app -> make an account (the app will default to some instance, at least it did for me) -> use it exactly like Twitter.
  
  How do you follow someone you discovered while browsing a foreign instance?
  
  Open app on phone and search them up.
  
  Or go to the instance I use and search them up
  
  Bluesky:
  
  Download official, fully featured app and not something utterly crippled
  
  Looks and feels like Twitter
  
  No weird tech mumbo-jumbo (WTF is a server, is that like a Discord server, what's that gotta do with Twitter) confusing you because there are no instances to choose from
  
  Make an account
  
  UI, UX, look & feel 100%, 1:1 fully identical with immediate pre-Musk Twitter
  
  No need to get used to anything because literally everything stays precisely the same as what you're used to, only that it's no longer "Twitter" or "X" or "tweets"
  
  Use it literally precisely the same as Twitter
  
  Pretend you're still on Twitter, it won't make a difference
  
  If Mastodon wanted to compete with this, it would have to
  
  replace its default Web UI with an even more faithful clone of the immediate pre-Musk Twitter Web UI,
  
  replace its official app with something that's absolutely identical to the immediate pre-Musk Twitter app in all but name and branding
  
  remove the instance chooser without introducing any other option of joining any other instance than mastodon.social
  
  completely hide decentralisation and instances from newbies, ideally for a few months or years after they've joined
  
  introduce a content-forwarding algorithm like the one on X, but better
  
  forcibly ban Mastodon's user-grown culture and force pre-Musk Twitter culture upon everyone
  
  mollycoddle its users for months or years so that Mastodon really feels like "literally Twitter without Musk" by shielding them from not only all hints that Mastodon is different, but also from the entire rest of the Fediverse
  
  Maybe wasn't that way before, but when signing up on Bluesky now you are asked to choose a instance (bsky.social being the default), and the username contains the instance name, exactly like any Fediverse account.
  
  Good to know.
  
  Strangely, people don't seem to mind.
  
  I guess then a key difference is that Bluesky is presented to 𝕏 users as the same kind of monolith as 𝕏 whereas Mastodon is presented to them as a huge number of instances from which they absolutely have to pick one.
  
  As far as I'm aware, the big "problem" with Mastodon (and the Fediverse as a whole) is that you have to choose an instance to join. It's an aditional step that mainstream social media does not have and it's already enough to push regular people away. It's kinda like trying to convince a Windows user to jump ship to Linux, by the time you begin explaining what a distro is you've already lost them.
  
  Like I said in my comment tho. When I downloaded the app it automatically chose for me. I just made an account there and boom.
  
  So you didn’t get the choice at all? I guess people who sign up this way are going to be really confused why they can’t follow some accounts their friends can.
  
  Yes the choose was there but it automatically was filled with a default instance.
  
  You can choose. But you don't have to.
  
  The official Mastodon app has a box where you can pick one out of several hard-coded instances. It defaults to mastodon.social. You can pick a different instance if you want to. But you can also ignore it, scroll past it and let yourself be conveniently railroaded to mastodon.social without even knowing what an instance is.
  
  Better than no one having the ability to follow that person because a centrally controlled social media banned them.
  
  But worse than anyone being able to follow that person because they’re using a platform where moderation is separate from identity, as in AtProto.
  
  You are misrepresenting it. You would still run into this issue. Moderation being separate doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You will still not be able to follow someone your friends follow because your moderation service banned then.
  
  Is that helpful though? Isn't that the same as everyone registering at Lemmy.world?
  
  If you've never in your live chosen anything that has to do with IT, if all you know is centralised, monolithic silos, then you can't be expected to first choose one out of literal dozens of microblogging projects in the Fediverse and then one out of dozens, hundreds or thousands of instances.
  
  The Fediverse would be a whole lot smaller if not all newbies who didn't come from Reddit were railroaded hard to mastodon.social. Oh, and Lemmy would be a whole lot smaller without Redditors having been railroaded first to lemmy.ml and now to lemmy.world.
  
  I feel with mastodon it's different because instances don't host communities to subscribe to. Just people to follow
  
  @secret300 @fediverse @can There are bots that cross-post posts, they actually implement groups.
  
  Oh neat I didn't know that.
You say "chance", I read "intent" 🤷 Mainstream isn't what it's cracked up to be.
Yep then it will be the next twitter/Facebook/ect.

Wasn't it founded by the original founder of Twitter, not ex-employees? Not that it makes much difference...

Afaik it was an internal project at Twitter at first that was spunn off as a seperate company some time before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Jack Doresy only invested some start capital and was a board member for a while.

Any significant reason to make an account with Mastodon vs. Misskey (or I seem to remember the latter having several forks?)?

It's the culture of an instance that makes the difference, not which software it runs, but there is often a correlation. Misskey tends to get more people who appreciate cute emoji and comfy vibes.
I prefer Misskey (Misskey fork at least) because it's just much more feature rich, Mastodon doesn't even have quotes, on the other hand Misskey has a lot of cool stuff like markdown, more customization, avatar decorations, emoji reactions etc But to each their own, from minuses Misskey has it's own API so the variety of apps is smaller compared to Mastodon
The main draw of Mastodon for me (and why I didn't stick with the *key servers) is following hashtags. Really eases post discovery in an algorithm free world.

Otherwise the misskey forks have all manner of neat features to make using them a delight.
I've never used Misskey but used various Misskey forks for about a year. I ended moving back to Mastodon. In my experience, the forks are very good at all the extra razzle dazzle they add (MFM, emoji reacts, drive, etc.) but often aren't as good at the basics. I'd pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried. I found that stuff more of a minor nuisance at first but it got pretty old over time. It's been a few months since I migrated back, so some or all of those issues could be fixed or improved by now too.

Also, app support isn't great. I think most of the forks implement basic Mastodon support now that will allow most apps to work. But the downside is you only get Mastodon functionality in those apps and not the extras.
- I’d pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried.
  
  From what I've heard, they've all inherited these very same issues from Misskey. And apparently, they aren't trivial to fix, otherwise either Misskey or any of the Forkeys would have succeeded.
  
  I guess your best bet is to wait for Iceshrimp.NET going fully public and ideally stable. It's no longer a Forkey. It's rather a complete re-write from scratch of Iceshrimp, no longer in TypeScript and Vue.js, but in C#. Apparently, Misskey's codebase (plus what Calckey/Firefish added) was so bad that this was the most promising step to take.
  
  Also, app support isn’t great.
  
  Found the former Sharkey user.
  
  Sharkey's Mastodon API implementation is infamously terrible. The Sharkey community is still waiting for someone to step in and re-write the Mastodon API implementation from the ground up, so bad is it.
  
  But another issue is that everyone who could theoretically develop a mobile Fediverse app is on Mastodon. And so, instead of a good *key app, you get yet another Mastodon-only iPhone app and yet another Mastodon-only iPhone app from people who don't even know that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon.

@poVoq @VanHalbgott You should brush up your knowledge of Bluesky. It has become open source. People have started to write plugins for it and people run their own instances that federate. And there is also a bridge to ActivityPub.

I didn't claim that it wasn't open-source. And a 3rd party bridge doesn't make it compatible with ActivityPub.
- Seeing the reaction to the bridge, it seems that most Mastodon users don’t want AtProto to be compatible with ActivityPub.
  
  Many Mastodon users are against both Bluesky and Threads federation because they want the Fediverse to remain only Mastodon.
  
  Little do they know that the Fediverse has never been only Mastodon.
  
  If Bluesky was just another ActivityPub using site you could just defederate from it. This isn't really possible when there are many bridges that relay messages.
  
  But you also seem to have completely misunderstood what people objected to about the ATProto bridge. It wasn't the optional possibility to reach people on Bluesky. It was the automatic opt-in that most people objected to.
  
  By using the Fediverse, you implicitly opt in to having your content federated between different platforms. How is this any different?
  
  Not between platforms but within the Fediverse. Bluesky is not part of the Fediverse.
  
  The Fediverse is, by definition, anything that supports ActivityPub. If BlueSky supported ActivityPub – which is what the bridge was meant to accomplish – then it would be a part of the Fediverse.
  
  A bridge by definition does not make Bluesky compatible with ActivityPub and also does not make it part of the Fediverse. There used to be bridges to Twitter as well, but that doesn't mean Twitter supports activitypub or is part of the Fediverse.
Self hosted instances are artificially limited to 10 accounts, however https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation

And that's only the frontend "server" that can be self hosted, the "relay", that's more equivalent to a mastodon instance, doesn't seem to be self hostable.