Going to try to recapture some of the old magic that was #MedTwitter and #SciTwitter back in the day!

I'm Adam, an internal medicine physician, historian, author, and artificial intelligence researcher. I study how people and machines make decisions together. Great to meet everyone!

I guess it is not just #scitwitter that is moving to #bluesky:

https://www.wired.com/story/taylor-swift-fans-leaving-x-following-trumps-election/

A confession: I made an account on #bluesky a couple of weeks ago.

tl;dr it's not as good as #Mastodon.

I'm fully committed to the #fediverse and don’t like the idea of bluesky; but I made an account because I missed a bunch of #SciTwitter people who didn’t come over to Mastodon.

My (entirely subjective) thoughts:

Looking back at my tweets (while deleting them), I have to say there was definitely a different atmosphere there, at least on #SciTwitter, that I miss a bit on #Mastodon. Hard to say exactly what but I’ll try to formulate some aspects below.

I guess the main goal is that replicating these would improve the experience here? Let me know what you think or if you think of any other tweaks that would improve the Mastodon experience!

• things seem more smooth on Twitter, technically speaking. For example the scrolling on Twitter is somehow much smoother than on Mastodon. Probably speed but also something else, the way it stops at the right time or keeps scrolling or something?

• even visually, the tweets are more compact, so you can see more of them in the same space which helps with parsing more content.

• I spent a lot of my time there (twitter) looking back for old tweets and reposting them in a new convo (in a useful way). This is practically impossible to do on Masto without search, hopefully the new search will help with that!

• definitely, we used quote tweets a lot and 90% of the time for good things. It is really missing on here.

• a lot more “self-promotion” -type posts, which were actually nice to see

• a lot more “congratulation”- type posts (of course, following the self-promotion posts), also really nice to see

• the threads just look good, ideal size, easy to scroll (again), nice that you can answer to each one separately and it is clear what you are answering to, unlike on Masto (for now).

• answers were not spared, and we knew they’d boost the original tweet, so you’d be happy, grateful to get answers.

• I was originally against having an algorithm here to show posts (other than the current chronological one), but I am starting to really miss the choice to have it. I know people are working on this on our instance at least and that’s great 😁

• people maybe had a higher resistance threshold to criticism, and maybe because answers boost your tweet anyway, you would be more encouraged to engage with all answers. On Twitter you would rarely be left without an answer. On here it seems much more common (even if it’s not a criticism). Sometimes I even wonder if people are properly notified that they got answers to their posts. 🤔

Conclusion: The general impression is that on there (twitter), everything encouraged you to tweet, interact, engage because it was good for the original poster and good for you, and what you were saying was filtered anyway and would not invade others’ timelines. On Masto, there is always a tension before posting. Like a “Is it worth it?” Not exactly sure where it comes from but probably having an algorithm option will help with that, the challenge being to do that without turning Mastodon in the same addictive machine that #Twitter was.