You only see the likes from your instance, they don’t federate to others. This is a purposeful decision made my the Mastodon team, but I don’t agree with their reasoning behind it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11339

Relevant video from PirateSoftware talking about the difference in engagement between them.

If you can’t decide, then you can just use the flagship instance, mastodon.social.

It doesn’t need to be, as long as there is also a proper default for those who don’t care. Lemmy and Mastodon both unfortunately lacked this during the periods where they both had the most opportunity to grow.

Nowadays Mastodon does it pretty well. Users don’t need to know anything, they just download Mastodon from the app store and register on the instance it chooses by default.

I just opened BlueSky to see how many people I followed using their own PDS instance and the fourth post in my feed was from someone using one, and the 7th was from Washington Post who also uses their own.

Bluesky does have federation, it’s not at the level of Mastodon’s, but it’s improving. You can host a personal data server, which lets you host your account from your own server. You do still access this account through the main BlueSky website and apps, but authentication is done through your own server.

Also, a Bluesky and Mastodon user, although I use Mastodon significantly more. Both have upsides and downsides. Mastodon’s onboarding experience has improved, but it’s still worse than Bluesky’s. Also, the fact that Mastodon doesn’t federate likes is honestly very strange. It makes the platform look dead at first glance, which really hurts first impressions.

I still prefer Mastodon, federation is great and I’ve had an easier time finding people to follow there. Bluesky’s feature of following community made feeds is really cool though.

A great custom skin, and far better defaults for both privacy and speed, based on Betterfox.

The fact that a fork that simply has a better UI and default settings is gaining so much popularity shows how bad Mozilla is fumbling their product.