I feel like scientists should move towards open source solutions … I feel like most scientists are smart enough to launch a mastodon server, but well.
Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
Submitted 1 week ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
ubergeek@lemmy.today 6 days ago
Most scientists aren’t allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don’t have the time.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 days ago
Oh know how. Just because that scientists doesn’t mean that they are necessarily particularly computer literate. I won’t have to explain to a university professor that wireless electricity doesn’t exist and the Wi-Fi is only for internet. So yeah.
naught101@lemmy.world 6 days ago
What… Are you taking about? I know hundreds of scientists and the vast majority of them interact with social media just as much as normal people.
earphone843@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Being a scientist doesn’t mean you have the technical knowledge to run a public facing server.
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Being a scientist kinda means to me you’re able to follow a very easy to understand guide to install mastodon on …
glitchdx@lemmy.world 6 days ago
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it’s more feature complete than windows (it isn’t).
I use lemmy because I hate u/spez, not because it’s more feature complete than reddit (it isn’t).
I use blender because it’s free and it’s actually kinda great, if all free and open source software was like blender, then it would be a no-brainer to use FOSS all of the time, and it would be easy to convince the normies to do the same.
also also
I’m using linux mint, i have minor complaints about it, but nothing worse than what microsoft is currently doing with windows. It’s just different, and that bothers me. middle click paste is the bane of my existence, but other people swear by it. Just before I switched over, I learned about windows 10’s built in emoji keyboard, and I really liked that. A year later (literally last week) I discovered a program that does most of what the windows emoji thingy did, and I can manually edit a keybind for the function to accomplish amost the same thing. FOSS, yay, it’s free if you don’t value your time in currency amounts. FOSS could be so good if only it were good.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it’s more feature complete than windows (it isn’t).
lol… “Feature complete” if you want terrible features.
Natanael@infosec.pub 6 days ago
Bluesky is open source though
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing as on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network… it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Never meet your heroes. If a scientist is human, they’re as fallible as any other.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 days ago
Just because they know using Mastodon they are bad people? What the hell kind of take is that?
naught101@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Some of us have. There are a few science focused servers.
Miaou@jlai.lu 6 days ago
Never worked in academia eh? Plenty of dumb (and, more importantly here, computer illiterate) people there too.
moe93@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
It costs time and money. The handful of times I published articles in an open access journal, I had to pay close to $5K USD per publication.
Theoretically, researchers can publish on Mastodon or something similar but that unfortunately won’t give us the reach we need. That might be fine with well established names, but for dumb-dumbs like myself who are still trying to make a name for ourselves in our field, we want the highest impact publisher we can find. Those typically come with a price tag.
Sometimes the grant also dictates acceptable publishers were you can submit your manuscript.
Sadly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Most people who work as “scientists” aren’t actually scientists.
Arkouda@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Define “Scientist”.
Mars2k21@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Going to play devil’s advocate here.
Bluesky is just…better than any Fediverse microblogging platform. In terms of UI, discoverability, and keeping a balance of users in the community.
Mastodon sucks for regular people. And none of the other better platforms like Firefish ever gain enough steam to beat Mastodon because of existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub (this also includes Mastodon itself to an extent).
x00z@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Mastodon is great.
The only reason why it doesn’t get as much traction is because it doesn’t manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I’ve seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones “didn’t made them stay as long”. For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
Xanza@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.
It’s a great concept. There’s a reason a lot of people use it.
oni@lemm.ee 6 days ago
what are those?
existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub
thisorthatorwhatever@lemmy.world 6 days ago
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
shortrounddev@lemmy.world 6 days ago
There’s a couple contenders but they’re not very good. I think most FOSS people don’t WANT a facebook alternative; they’d prefer to keep their IRL identity separate from the internet. And the people who don’t care also don’t care enough to want to go federated.
There’s spacehey as a myspace alternative though. That’s pretty neat but it’s full of teenagers unfortunately.
gheesh@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Friendica aims at that. I’m not sure about the results as I haven’t tried it.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I believe you’ve hit the nail on the head, the only people I’ve noticed that really want such a social media account are generally people who were older than millennial, out of Millennials gen Z and gen A, I don’t really see much interest in a social media account that is directly linked to your actual identity. Most of them are more interested in a pseuado-anonymous style account that only asks for a username and doesn’t actually link you to a real world identity.
Facebook was great in principle, it was intended as like a college student community and evolved from there, it was never meant to fill the goal of what the platform is doing today.
As such as Facebook deteriorates, there isn’t a huge demand for a Facebook alternative, because the people who are leaving the platform aren’t actively seeking to replace what is lost.
hulfpa@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
Krompus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And it’s ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
fubarx@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it’s still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.
Bluesky wants to tell people they’re not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that’s their key advantage.
The only thing that will guarantee they don’t end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven’t come up with a long-term revenue model, so it’s not clear how they can avoid it.
Zachariah@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 week ago
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
I’m so tired of this nonsense. The very simple answer is “literally any server”. It really doesn’t matter. At this point most apps have a default server.
Supernova1051@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
moopet@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being “join mastodon.social”, with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to “bluesky social”.
It’s a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it’s difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This question is extremely easy to answer. We all did it. I don’t think people on Lemmy are some kind of master race. smh.
The_Terrible_Humbaba@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This is such a cop out and makes no sense. A “server” is basically just a website. The only reason we call them servers/instances is because they are are running the same software in the background and can communicate with each other - that’s it. So we put them all under common flags such as “Mastodon” for those who use the Mastodon “template”, and “Fediverse” for all the “templates” that can communicate with each other.
This is literally just a problem with marketing and communication, people hear “instances”/“servers” and they shit themselves because they can’t be bothered to do a bit of research. In reality they are just different websites that can communicate with each other. You have the “shakedown.social” website, the “dads.cool” website, the “bookwyrm.social” website, and plenty of others; they are all Twitter clones (Mastodon) and they all allow you to see the content posted on the others.
whatwhatwhatwhat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.
In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be be easily discoverable.
whiteleopard@lemm.ee 6 days ago
What’s blocking Mastodon’s posts to be discoverable?
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don’t want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.
That’s true by and large and we also don’t have enough moderators here as is.
And for reasons I don’t understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trust accounts don’t transition to the fediverse, as if they won’t bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).
Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I’m curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I’m not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.
CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Probably because it has an algorithm
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 week ago
This.
Many people like stuff getting recommending to them algorithmically.
notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world 1 week ago
tech and age, need for investment.
- fediverse is complicated for scientists not doing computer sciency stuff
- senior researchers are less flexible with new tech, so similarity w twitter means they don’t have to learn a new system
- Already present audience means there’s little risk in investing time in BS.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
B/c people are indoctrinated under capitalism to need some kinda daddy.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Isn’t BlueSky part of a fediverse?
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 1 week ago
A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub)
ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Would he better if it was Mastodon, but I suppose I shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and good riddance to Twitter, indeed.
shininghero@pawb.social 6 days ago
While there has been some onboarding QOL stuff for mastodon, Bluesky still has them beat on that.
The “People” segment in the explore menu is a nice start, but it’s still dependent on the users picking a server that somewhat matches their interests.
grepe@lemmy.world 6 days ago
thing is lot of that is on purpose. mastodon and fediverse are more of an attempt to come back to the state where there is no algorithm picking for you… but too many people nowdays are simply too lazy to search and actively choose what they want to see.
what we really need is to separate content (keep that in fediverse) and content access and presentation (the interface people use to access the content). if you want a bot feeding you content whole day and for your internet to become a tv you nobody can stop you. but if you want to think amd search nobody should stop you either
Sine_Fine_Belli@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Same here, well said. Bluesky’s not perfect, at least it’s not Twitter. I wish more people would use it though
deathbird@mander.xyz 6 days ago
I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it’s more popular than Mastodon is that it’s more centralized and in practical terms that means it’s easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it’s the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it’s waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
When you sign up with Bluesky, it gives you the choice to sign up with the big main server or with an auxiliary server. Just like Lemmy does.
The problem is that when Lemmy got hit with a big influx of users, the main server couldn’t handle the load, so they quit accepting new users. This confused and upset a lot of people, because now they had to go shopping for another instance to apply to, and many of the bigger ones weren’t accepting new users, either, because of the same problem. This was a crucial moment for the adoption of the platform, and the infrastructure just wasn’t there to handle it.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I never had a Xitter account so take what I say with a grain of salt, as I only interacted with the platform as a spectator.
For me it was funny to watch as I slowly saw people dive into madness over the most irrelevant things.
It didn’t matter if it was left or right people still lost all senses over unimportant things like Hunter Biden’s laptop or this week’s conspiracy theory.
I opened Mastodon and as I scroll through I see the following order:
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- republican bad post
- something linux related (usually hector martin)
- republican bad post
And I get it, republican is bad, but after reading 3-4 republic bad posts my mental state needs a break or something different which is what Xitter was able to do. Some new music being announced/discussed, maybe a video game, maybe a joke.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
I personally think that the problem is rooted in defederation, it’s being used willy-nilly like it doesn’t have effect on the people using the platform. But not becoming an echo chamber is essential to a platform’s long term health. If I know that a platform has the same message for me when I open the app I’ll just start using it less, which is what happened with Lemmy sadly, I open my feed and it’s full of dystopian and republican posts, I just don’t bother anymore.
Incoherent rant over.
deathbird@mander.xyz 5 days ago
Your rant is 100% sensible and/or valid and/or based or whatever one says these days.
If a user wants their own echo chamber, let them cultivate it themselves. The hosts should not decide for them, and the choice to defederate should be based on practical/material/legal concerns only.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
I think you need to curate your feeds better. My experience doesn’t match yours.
boxfulloffoxes@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
Isn’t the whole thing about BlueSky that your feed is your feed though? You actively select and curate what you want. So if you want new music, games, comedy - follow new music, games, and comedy. Sure, those accounts might then post other things sometimes, but by and large, that’s my understanding of BSky.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I haven’t used Mastodon, but if it’s anything like Lemmy, most people won’t want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.
deathbird@mander.xyz 5 days ago
To me the biggest issue with federated platforms is defederation: deliberately breaking interoperability.
Like, imagine if email servers (the original federated network) blocked whole domains as aggressively Mastodon or even Lemmy servers do? It never would have worked.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
most people won’t want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
What have you seen that convinced you of this? Has this been studied?
Dil@is.hardlywork.ing 6 days ago
They planned ahead to make it popular, twitter developed it while losing money, my conspiracy theory is their goal was always to transition to bluesky since its model is more sustainable for long term control
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
That isn’t a conspiracy theory. That was, in fact, the original plan. Jack Dorsey explicitly stated this from the outset. However, due to reasons (Wikipedia doesn’t go into specifics), the project lead decided to make Bluesky independent from Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, he severed all ties.
Genius@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
There’s no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
lemmus@szmer.info 6 days ago
The thing is, bluesky is just old twitter, it will become X eventually…Bluesky sucks, but jessus, mastodon sucks in terms of usability. Its only for technical people and experience on mastodon is fatal compared to bluesky, sad that mastodon won’t take over, as it could…at least bluesky is not bad YET.
zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Bluesky is more popular because it has VC money behind it.
gi1242@lemmy.world 1 week ago
oof. blue sky was created by the guy who made twitter wasn’t it? if he sells to the next bond villain, blue sky will just become twitter 2.0.
open source, decentralized.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon just will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
smeg@infosec.pub 1 week ago
How many times can people keep making the same mistake without us concluding they’re stupid? Closed corporate social networks ALWAYS go to shit. Enshitification is inevitable. And you’ll have the sunk cost fallacy stopping them from leaving, until they all finally get fed up and switch again. Own your network - stop swapping.
DSTGU@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
First time seeing HTTP code 451
jsomae@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
nothing makes me more skeptical that seeing the word “scientists” in a headline.
MrMcGasion@lemmy.world 6 days ago
When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.
pls@lemmy.plaureano.nohost.me 6 days ago
I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
sircac@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I would prefer any ActivityPub instance, but press media (and in general private entities), to which scientific institutes intend diffusion, is moving to bluesky…
index@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
See you can be a really good scientist and not smart at the same time. Move to mastodon.
resetbypeer@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Now all governments around the globe and other public services and we.are getting somewhere.
Tillman@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Sort of like how they moved out of Florida and Texas. Repubs want a brain drain for some reason.
giacomo@lemm.ee 1 week ago
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
azalty@jlai.lu 5 days ago
What we need are good algorithms
Telorand@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Agreed, at least it’s happening with Meta too.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
wait… is it? dont threaten me with a good time