“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst & uncertainty.”
That survey with only a 5% response rate went viral & got me wondering about other evidence & how the #ScienceTwitter#MastodonMigration was panning out.
tl;dr There's been a big recent surge here; the future of #ScienceMastodon looks bright; ScienceX is materially diminished tho the network is still there.
My science Twitter contacts seem much more enthusiastic about Bluesky than Mastodon. The greatest criticism I have heard about Mastodon is its decentralized nature; people were afraid of being stuck in silos. As far as I understand, #Bluesky is also decentralized, yet this does not seem to be how is how it is perceived. It seems like an opportunity has been missed here.
What do you think?
Musing about how clients might evolve beyond raw firehoses ...
"While I still want better hashtag-following, I wouldn't need it nearly as much if I could just tell my client to give me a daily/weekly/monthly digest of a person’s posts, based on my frequency preference. Smart clients could even suggest new frequency preferences based on my engagement (or lack thereof) with certain feeds." -- @erlend
During the timeframe I was most active on Twitter, I revelled in the norms + ease of access to well-developed subcommunities like #ScienceTwitter, #DisabilityTwitter, + many others.
With zero boundaries between us, I could just pick deeply interesting folks to follow, + learned a ton. Toxicity was mostly elsewhere, as was extreme silliness, + all kinds of other stuff I could just ignore.
Shaping tools to make this style of curation easier is my jam.
Nothing says "Science should be free of gatekeeping and special interests" like trying to move #ScienceTwitter to #BlueSky, an invite-only proprietary service run by tech billionaires 🤷