Technology

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

They gotta get their news out to the masses, at least they choose something besides twitter.

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.

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.

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.

Presumably either because they've not heard of the Fediverse, because almost nobody has, and/or because they want people to actually see what they post.

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.

At least they weren’t baffled