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.
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Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
B/c people are indoctrinated under capitalism to need some kinda daddy.
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 get it, its so frustrating. with bluesky we are just hitting the snooze button, theres bound to be problems with a privately owned social network again.
the fact people are categorically rejecting a nazi platform for being nazi is actually pretty refreshing though.
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.
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.
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.
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 email experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
No that decision is, for most people, made for them. You use the server provided for you by your ISP/work/university or the one that's associated with logging into your smartphone.
Most people use several email servers for work, school, personal, etc.
Somehow those dolts figured it out. Shocking. \s
Your email server doesn't also run the group email list and all the join/drop/approve/ban operations. And if you bring your own email domain name, you can go somewhere else and get no disruption. But if you sign up for me@hotmail.com and hotmail bans you, you'll lose all your connections and conversation history.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board, or a messaging service group. It's apples and rocket ships.
Bluesky is offering simple one-stop answers to a lot of these concerns. Fediverse needs to answer all these, plus address the whole long-term financial sustainability question.
The canonical list of operations on a social media platform far exceed that of an email service, a bulletin board,
This is just untrue. There's almost nothing to Twitter, IG, etc., while many bulletinboards are far more complicated.
"How can I send Gmails?"
Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.
just tell people to join mastodon.social. problem solved
This isn't good, though. The whole point of the Fediverse is to be a decentralized network. If we push everyone to a single server, we're centralizing the network!
This comes with added expenses for the maintainers, for one, and increases privacy and data-protection concerns as well.
Also, Mastodon actually already funnels people towards .social, though they don't push it too hard. Check out joinmastodon.org and see for yourself.
IMO, the solution needs to be something like a server auto-selector, where the location of the user is taken into account, weighted by the number of active users on the server, and using some sort of vetting system to try to avoid sending people to unmaintained servers (like only selecting servers with a certain degree of uptime and uptime stability).
What happens when their server expenses aren't covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
And getting a whole community moved over... oof.
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies. It took two years to convince people on to Signal, and 2/3 of the people didn't make the jump. And this was with a small group of people who knew each other IRL. Imagi e doing that for tens or hundreds of thousands worldwide.
This is why people are hesitant to get off Meta/Twitter. They're not going to do it again.
What happens when their server expenses aren't covered, or bad people move in and every message has to be moderated, or the site moderators ban you?
What happens when BlueSky does this?
I moved a private mailing list to a WhatsApp group, then they changed their privacy policies.
Answering your own question there.
Just to be clear... I'm a massive Fediverse fan, and have concerns about BSKY's governance. But many communities streaming off Twitter seem to be heading toward BSKY because it's a shallower on-ramp.
Mastodon people recognize this and are working to smooth down the friction points.
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.
Exactly! And even if a person gets it wrong, you're encouraged to make an account elsewhere without fault or foul. That's what I did. And what was I looking for when deciding on a server? "A general purpose server." Oh, look World seems to be it, what a coincidence that it's the top suggestion. lol...
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 trusted 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 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.
Exactly. I've curated my Mastodon feed way more than Bsky, and still, it's incredibly boring. Great if you want to use socials less.
It also tends to overvalue new stuff, so whoever screams the most occupies the most space in the feed.
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.
Isn't BlueSky part of a fediverse?
A fediverse, but not the fediverse (ActivityPub/the one you’re on right now)
Why is ActivityPub "the" Fediverse? "Fediverse" is very broad and encompasses multiple protocols, a lot of which predate ActivityPub becoming commonplace.
The original Fediverse apps are still around and don't use ActivityPub. For example, StatusNet / GNU Social use OStatus and Identica uses Activity Streams / ActivityPump (which was the protocol before ActivityPub). diaspora (if it's still around) used its own protocol too.
Some of the older apps have adapted to use ActivityPub, while some of them still exist in their own separate part of the Fediverse.
Because a fediverse is any group of technologies that talk to each other via a common protocol. In 2025 that’s ActivityPub and has been for awhile. It would be one hell of a stretch to assert that a single platform with its own home made protocol that doesn’t talk to any other technology in the entire fediverse as part of that fediverse. So at best you can say Bluesky has its own fediverse. And if one fediverse is going to be “the fediverse” it’s going to be the one that actually connects all the most common platforms people use today, including Diaspora.