Mastodon and Bluesky Wrapped 2025

I’ve been syndicating my posts to Bluesky and to Mastodon all of 2025. These are the two generalist “social media platforms” that I use actively. And by “actively use” I mean:

• syndicate my blog posts there
• open the site’s homepage and scan general topics a couple times a week
• reply to other people’s posts there
  • see my Mastodon replies in 2025
  • see my Bluesky replies in 2025
• reply to other people’s replies on my posts
• occasionally, I’ll post directly to the platform, which is then ingested into my site
  • see my Mastodon posts in 2025
  • see my Bluesky posts in 2025

Note

I also use Strava and Letterboxd and HackerNews and GitHub quite a bit and they are social online platforms but they’re topic-specific, not generalized “social media” like Bluesky and Mastodon.

So, how is it going?

There are a ton of people on both platforms, but in my experience there’s not much overlap of people or sentiment or engagement between them.

Blluesky is more like the journalist/artist/author/politician population, with a skew toward left/central politics. I see my actual political representatives posting there, so I message/reply to them on that platform. I still don’t see any “normal” people on there, though. No one I know in real life has been posting to Bluesky regularly.

Mastodon seems to me to have become almost exclusively a niche platform for technically-minded people. I see my colleagues in software and “expert” communities (science, research, mathematics, design, etc.) posting on that platform, so I message/reply to them there. I still don’t know any “normal” people in my life that even have a Mastodon account.

I used to have both apps installed on my phone but this Fall I uninstalled them. I was opening them just to see what was new and to see any notifications. (It’s very frustrating to me that neither platform has the option to have my interactions/notifications emailed to me. I have to go to their site to check for them.) But inevitably I would scroll for a bit and just see a lot of people complaining about the world (I sympathize) and also complaining about each other in petty ways (I abhor). I always left that interaction in a worse mood than I began it, so I stopped doing it. Now, I just open the websites directly once a week or so, maybe I respond to someone, then leave.

For accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon that I really do want to read consistently when they post, I subscribe to their RSS feed in my feed reader. Luckily, both platforms still (and have always) expose RSS feed versions of any account’s posts.

Bluesky

I made this using Olof’s Bluesky Wrapped 2025 site.

I’m getting more “engagement” on Bluesky, but it’s mostly “hearts”, so I don’t feel particularly engaged. I’ll keep syndicating there, as I think it’s sometimes helpful to people.

Mastodon

I used Mastodon Wrapped: Your Year in Review to generate these stats. The Wrapstodon 2025 provided on mastodon.social was pretty bare-bones.

I’m getting less “engagement” on Mastodon, but I feel like the replies are higher quality when they do happen. I’ll keep syndicating there, as I think it’s sometimes helpful to people.

Syndication

I’m still only syndicating my Blog posts to these platforms. Maybe I should start posting my Notes? Other people post links with comments all the time, which is basically what my Notes are…