Because scientists are normal people, and probably a higher proportion of them than normal are tech nerds.

People don’t have only one interest. The board members of fediscience.org are biosystems scientists and forensic linguists.

Would be kinda cool to have some more African and south+east Asian instances. I would happily donate to help get some instances hosted in poorer countries.

Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.

If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…

The whole point of federation is that that can’t really happen, or at least they can fuck a single server, but not the whole ecosystem.

My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.

It’s a problem for the same reason twitter dying sucks… The network effect is important, and maintaining yours during a slow, piecemeal mass migration is hard. Which is why I’m sticking with mastodon now, despite more of my relevant network being on BS.

It’s important because, along with the ability to migrate accounts, it prevents/deters enshittification. In betting Bluesky will hit that wall in the next few years (I’m guessing they’ll never properly implement federation).

It’s not that it’s less annoying, it’s that it was in the right place at the right time to capture sufficient network effect…

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.

Some of us have. There are a few science focused servers.

Scientists: invents commercial scale fusion Capitalist: hordes the almost free energy because why not? Poor people are only useful as a resource anyway.

Wait, what is the cheaper alternative to the moon landing?

Holy crap I feel old now. Since when? I’m still driving a car without a touch screen, and that’s never going to change.

I wonder how hard it would be to make an open source car brain that can be a drop-in replacement for the commercial ones?

Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)

The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.

Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.

Yep. Already true to a large extent. But it doesn’t take a majority of the world to make the fediverse work. We just need enough for it to become broadly attractive to a critical mass of people. It’s big enough to self-sustain now, so I think it’s just a matter of time until it hits that point.

Good take. Bluesky is a good stop-gap.

I’ve also been thinking, if Bluesky never federates and enshittifies in a similar way to Twitter (which it will do much faster, just cause it’s a different era), then the Bluesky exodus will really have a solid reason to try to understand why decentralisation is so important…

What… are you talking about?

Bluesky has the network effect, at least for some domains of content. Mastodon has about 50% coverage of my domain of interests, but that’s probably way less for many people.

Mastodon has the guaranteed lack of enshittification via decentralisation. Bluesky is promising it, but it seems far from guaranteed, and if it doesn’t happen, I’m betting it’ll enshittify about 4 times faster than twitter, because everything does these days…

So Bluesky is probably a better bet in the short term for general users… I’m glad people are escaping twitter at least. But I’m sticking with Mastodon, 'cause fuck going through all that again in a couple of years.

Then a rapid decent into profit maximisation at the expense of user experience.