Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
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Now all governments around the globe and other public services and we.are getting somewhere.
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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.
I'd reckon that managing a social media server is more involved than just using social media.
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- No "starter kits" which are just positive-feedback loops for popular accounts
- No "algorithm" which promotes popularity or engagement over quality or relevance
Bluesky's main feed is totally algorithm free, it's just the people you follow's posts in chronological order, same as mastodon.
Starter kits are optional, but they allow you to get started in hours rather than months. For me, they made the difference between a vibrant and interesting feed well tailored towards my interests, and a very sparse feed that I didn't use on Mastodon. For me they were the difference between a useful social network and a non-useful one.
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Thanks for the update. Yes the recommended feed is personalized. It's optional. The main feed has no algorithm,, just who you follow.
The tagging sounds great. One of the problems with masto is showing the hashtags in the body making posts that use them look awful, and of course being entirely set by the author
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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..
There's plenty of people on masto saying they have accounts on both but prefer bsky due to difficulty managing replies.
As I say I don't really understand it but it's a real thing big accounts experience.
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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.
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.
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First time seeing HTTP code 451
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Yes the recommended feed is personalized. It's optional. The main feed has no algorithm,, just who you follow.
The thing is, a lot of social media sites have or had this. YouTube has the subscriptions feed. Twitter has (I don't know anymore) a following feed. Reddit used to keep posts on your homepage only being from subscribed subreddits.
Thing is, people don't use them. They see maintaining subscriptions as work and so want to be fed posts by algorithm.
Been watching @TechConnectify 's latest?! He has some interesting stats on the subscriptions feed on YT in there - and yes, it's shockingly low.
I think people want plug and play. Maintaining subs isn't work as such after you've set it up, but it does take that initial setup. https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA -
First time seeing HTTP code 451
because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.
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Been watching @TechConnectify 's latest?! He has some interesting stats on the subscriptions feed on YT in there - and yes, it's shockingly low.
I think people want plug and play. Maintaining subs isn't work as such after you've set it up, but it does take that initial setup. https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuABeen watching @TechConnectify 's latest?!
Yes. Yes I have.
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Why switch to BlueSky if you have Mastodon...
Why switch to Mastodon when there is Misskey?
Why use Misskey when there is Hubzilla?
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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.
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.
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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.
Using social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get more mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren't the ones who operate these things. Merely getting the approval to get the project started is an immense task.
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Yes the recommended feed is personalized. It's optional. The main feed has no algorithm,, just who you follow.
The thing is, a lot of social media sites have or had this. YouTube has the subscriptions feed. Twitter has (I don't know anymore) a following feed. Reddit used to keep posts on your homepage only being from subscribed subreddits.
Thing is, people don't use them. They see maintaining subscriptions as work and so want to be fed posts by algorithm.
I use them. I use platforms more that have them. I leave platforms that don't.
But to each their own I guess.
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Using social media is far removed from operating your own publicly available social media server.
This coming from someone who is trying to get more mastodon usage in higher ed. Profs aren't the ones who operate these things. Merely getting the approval to get the project started is an immense task.
University IT departments don't want to be running some random Mastodon on the server anyway. It's got nothing to do with the universities day-to-day operations it's just an extra thing that would be required on top of what they already do.
Also the only university professors who would actually be able to run the mastered on server themselves will be those in the computer science domain. A biologist isn't going to know how to do it any more than any random member of the public.
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Most scientists aren't allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don't have the time.
Or 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.
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Never meet your heroes. If a scientist is human, they're as fallible as any other.
Just because they know using Mastodon they are bad people? What the hell kind of take is that?
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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).
I know; as much as I love the concept, I can already see .world soaking up most of the users, which might not be the best thing for federation - but TBF when I came over from Reddit, my main goal was to find something decent and similar, and federation was secondary at best for me; so I'll see if it gets any worse, but for the moment, the first list definitely overweighs the second "list" for me.
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Main one is that it doesn't manipulate your feed with stuff "you might enjoy" so you can't be easily manipulated by the people setting the algorithm. Of course, this is exactly why people find it hard. People want to be fed stuff and told what to consume.
That's not really a fair description of what's going on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a recommendation algorithm, can you imagine trying to use Netflix if it didn't tell you about any of the shows and you just have to guess and type in a film in order to see if it existed?
The problem with algorithms is when they're the only option, or when they are invisible and you think you are getting a timeline of people you've subscribed to, but really you're getting an algorithm optimizing retention. As long as it's just recommending stuff there's nothing wrong with it, in fact as a lot of people point out, it's kind of necessary.
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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).
Yeah I agree that we will probably happen, but the problem is using Mastodon is such a pain for the vast majority of people, it's not worth the hassle.
And I say that to someone who uses both platforms.
