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Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

arstechnica.com

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Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#31

Post by Telemakhos »

znpy wrote: post #12
izzydata wrote: post #4

It's surprising that any serious organization or person would still use Twitter in its current state.

It's surprising that any serious organization used it at all. It was never a good place to spend your time really. It's sad that the science community is just moving to another walled garden rather than spawning its own network of federated ActivityPub services (eg: mastodon). Bluesky seems to be based on an open protocol (AT Protocol), but how actually interoperable is that ? I can't find a list of non-bluesky AT pr…

Back in the 90s, every University had its own mailserver, USENET server, etc. These offered authentication to any user in the University, and each was federated with other institutions and the internet as a whole.

I'm surprised Universities haven't set up a federated network of ActivityPub servers, with each University hosting its faculty and student accounts on its server. The signal-to-noise ratio of a University-only network would be amazing.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#32

Post by epistasis »

hk1337 wrote: post #20

Reading through the comments makes it seem like Bluesky is the Titantic and it's proponents are the orchestra on board.

Any news article that could be interpreted as critical of Musk these days seems to have a broad army of commenters that swarm to add low information critique of critique. This article is likely to be flagged off the front page very quickly too.

Edit: yes, and as predicted, this straightforward reporting on the scientific community's migration of social networks has been flagged off the front page, because too many HN folks can not distinguish bad news for Musk from biased against Musk. There's no reason for this to be flagged except for the political motivations od the flashers.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#33

Post by conradfr »

epistasis wrote: post #19
nomilk wrote: post #10

Can't help but notice arstechnica seems to have an anti-Elon agenda. I recall them posting articles claiming Twitter's content was important for historical reasons (agree on that) and would disappear once Elon took over, which afaik, didn't happen.

X hides discussions. If somebody sends you a link you can't see the discussion without an account and logging in and being extensively tracked. Not sure what you mean about anti-Elon bias. This was straightforward reporting of the truth. If reality has an anti-Elon bias then perhaps it's not bias.

Before the take over you couldn't see the linked tweet at all.

(it was not always this way though)

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#34

Post by gjsman-1000 »

Telemakhos wrote: post #31
znpy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprising that any serious organization used it at all. It was never a good place to spend your time really. It's sad that the science community is just moving to another walled garden rather than spawning its own network of federated ActivityPub services (eg: mastodon). Bluesky seems to be based on an open protocol (AT Protocol), but how actually interoperable is that ? I can't find a list of non-bluesky AT pr…

Back in the 90s, every University had its own mailserver, USENET server, etc. These offered authentication to any user in the University, and each was federated with other institutions and the internet as a whole. I'm surprised Universities haven't set up a federated network of ActivityPub servers, with each University hosting its faculty and student accounts on its server. The signal-to-noise ratio of a University-o…

> The signal-to-noise ratio of a University-only network would be amazing

Ha; no. It would be students self-censoring to avoid anything that could draw a universities' ire... while they meet up on Discord to share their actual thoughts, cheating techniques, personal feelings, and date nights. It would be University LinkedIn.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#35

Post by metamet »

gyanchawdhary wrote: post #22
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No true scotsman's fallacy - no serious person would use X; if you use X you aren't serious .

[flagged]

Well, if it helps you feel better, the downvotes are probably because it's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. And yours are probably due to your endorsement of it and whining about "lefties".

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#36

Post by noirscape »

izzydata wrote: post #4

It's surprising that any serious organization or person would still use Twitter in its current state.

There's exactly three reasons for people to stick to Twitter:

* They don't care/agree with the policies of the guy running it.

* Legacy reasons; either they have no reason to leave (automated org accounts keep running until something in the workflow breaks) or they have an existing community that doesn't want to move. This group will eventually leave but is currently stuck with inertia. Most "public service" accounts are in this category.

* And finally, for artists, Bluesky is undesirable as a platform because it has some very aggressive image compression compared to Twitter (2000x2000 is the absolute limit). Some are dualposting to Bluesky, but are unlikely to fully leave Twitter for this reason.

Finally, I'll note that while accounts are generally abandoning Twitter, this doesn't automatically mean they're moving to Bluesky either. A lot of those service accounts just up and vanished and just said "well, go visit our website".

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#37

Post by andunie »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #8

FWIW, Bluesky still seems unfriendly to email alias providers. I never managed to create an account on Bluesky as one of their support email blocks certain email domains. They still have a long way to go.

It's so odd that they still get to enjoy their status as a "decentralized" "open" social network when it's really just a centralized platform by definition (and it's not even their fault, there is simply no way to do what they want to do without centralization).

Sure, someone may say "the AT Protocol is open", but that means nothing because the AT Protocol is not Bluesky, Bluesky is one centralized platform that happens to "talk" that protocol (well, of course, since the "protocol" is literally defined by whatever they happen to be doing), it still controls who can be inside and who can't.

TL;DR: Nostr is a much better option for most use cases, sadly for some unfortunate reason it never got to enjoy too much attention from a wider technologist community.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#38

Post by djtango »

izzydata wrote: post #14
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No true scotsman's fallacy - no serious person would use X; if you use X you aren't serious .

I don't agree. There are still serious organizations and people using Twitter. I believe that to be true. I'm just surprised they haven't moved. For example there are emergency systems or local governments that announce information on Twitter. These feel like serious organizations to me. At minimum I feel like they should be in multiple places and not just Twitter.

Ultimately Twitter is timely and has almost universal mindshare.

A few weeks ago when there was the pacific earthquake, I had family who were very close to a danger zone vacationing. Google was not sufficient for finding good local timely info as an outsider but twitter was.

I would never even think to check BlueSky or Mastodon, and my family will never have heard of them.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#39

Post by ozmodiar »

nomilk wrote: post #13
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #5

Bluesky is still trending downward in activity and has been losing popularity over the last year. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

This is extremely interesting. Didn't know of these stats. Would be great to be able to have twitter, mastodon and bluesky on the same graph (perhaps with different y-axes to allow comparison of their relative trends)

Threads is the one really taking off. Personally I'm not thrilled at Meta and Zuckerberg increasing their stranglehold on social media, but it seems to be the way things are going.

Re: Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

#40

Post by nomilk »

ozmodiar wrote: post #39
nomilk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely interesting. Didn't know of these stats. Would be great to be able to have twitter, mastodon and bluesky on the same graph (perhaps with different y-axes to allow comparison of their relative trends)

Threads is the one really taking off. Personally I'm not thrilled at Meta and Zuckerberg increasing their stranglehold on social media, but it seems to be the way things are going.

I haven't seen the stats but suspect Threads may appear to have high growth because it's starting from such a low base.
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