realitista

Building up a good list of follows on Mastodon is orders of magnitude harder than on Bluesky unfortunately. They need to address this if they want adoption.

Don't worry, orders are being canceled as we speak.

I disagree. Apple should not force other companies' products to work in an inferior way to their own. They already tried to force us all onto wireless headphones by removing the jack. They need to at least allow the 3rd party ones access to the same pairing and multihoming tech they use for their own. Openness is never a bad thing IMO.

I love living in the EU

With Tesla behind it, I'm sure it will happen and be an unmitigated disaster.

You can build a feed just from straight hashtags if you want, but I think combining it with crowdsourced tags, block lists, and keywords will get you better results.

For me the feeds solve a lot of problems with straight hashtags, like getting stuff that's the wrong language, or bot spam. But I guess if you are just going for visual stuff that stuff may be easier to tolerate.

If you don't like the feeds that are out there already, you can build your own feed. https://www.southernfriedscience.com/a-quick-and-dirty-guide-to-making-custom-feeds-on-bluesky/

On Bluesky you follow starter packs which are collections of users which go to your main feed. https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all

Or you follow feeds which are set up by users to track certain topics. These can be very highly customized follows of people, hashtags, keywords, crowd tagged topics, including blocks of certain stuff. These are like subreddits or Lemmy communities. https://blueskydirectory.com/feeds/all

For me it's the difference between something that's usable for its purpose and something that's not. As much as I wanted to use Mastodon and tried, it just never got off the ground. If Mastodon introduced starter packs, subscribable block lists, topic tagging and blocks, etc. I would use it in the same way I do Bluesky. But it hasn't done that so I don't.

Not setting up an account, that's roughly the same. Adding contacts by topic, blocking topics and people with bad agendas en masse, etc. I started my Mastodon account almost a year before Bluesky. In Bluesky I had something useful in a week. In Mastodon I still don't (and it's not for lack of effort).

But Bluesky does have a lot better features when it comes to actually effectively using the platform. Getting set up on Bluesky is orders of magnitude easier than Mastodon, and I do think that's a big part of why it's become the preferred destination recently. Mastodon had a real shot early on but didn't make it easy enough for people.

I am an AirPlay user so haven't tried the google cast. But it separately lists echo speakers and display group, works with google, and google cast as capabilities, so I'm guessing all work. There's probably a YouTube video showing it somewhere.