Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
There's no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
See you can be a really good scientist and not smart at the same time. Move to mastodon.
Non-EU folk - this website won’t open in EU because they don’t want to follow our local user privacy protections. What they’re going to do with your data? Who knows.
man that is so cheeky of them!
Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲
But yeah, you're 100% right.
Why switch to BlueSky if you have Mastodon...
These who waited until the X take over to move away are simply following trends.
I think there's a fairly serious problem for large accounts on mastodon but I will never have one so I can't quite understand it myself.
Something like dealing with replies / scolds without spending all day blocking is too hard. It doesn't help that "no algorithm" means "show first reply at the top" so quick replies can dominate comments.
The bit I don't understand is why this is fine on blue sky. Is it just different users? I can't quite believe that but I can't see why blue sky would be less annoying.
Cause the name is hard to remember.. I was trying to yesterday and the closest I could get is megatron and megalodon
I tried masterdon, mostertant (I don’t know what that one is) and eventually needed to look up the name from an E-Mail…
Guess why? /s For real, people, some of you live in a bubble...
In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.
Cool. I'm going out on a limb and saying Bluesky seems pretty based so far. I made an account when it was announced, and it's pretty cool. Nice app, seemingly good mission statement.
I don't want to dismiss something until it actually turns to shit. If it's good now, I'll use it now. When it turns to crap, I'll just jump off. I'll always have Lemmy and Mastodon as my mains, so I don't see the harm personally. 🤷♂️ Let's just hope it'll last for the scientists' sake.
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.
They gotta get their news out to the masses, at least they choose something besides twitter.
But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don't need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn't (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer
But we did leave...
...about a decade too late.
Scientists should consult tech people about stuff like this just like we should consult scientists for science stuff. Unfortunately a lot of tech people also aren't conscious of this stuff either.
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
Neat, I have an account on there already.
Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).
Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)
In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.
I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.
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.
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
Probably because it has an algorithm
It doesn’t though.
This.
Many people like stuff getting recommending to them algorithmically.
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.
Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.
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.
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 will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
Look at Linux's popularity over the
yearsdecades. I've used it since I was 10 years old twenty years ago. It is absolutely climbing. FOSS hasn't even peaked yet lolFOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
I wouldn't say never, but fedverse projects will need to find ways to smooth off the rough edges. Also the more enshittifcation happens the more I think people will be willing and able to get past the rough edges. If any one of the services breaks through and becomes mainstream, it'll provide a roadmap to success for other services and people will be more comfortable with the concepts.
Yes but it's also a good sign that he left the project some time ago. He's all about NOSTR now.