Mastodawn

Nicole Rust Jun 2, 2023

@debivort
I agree. I can only imagine that they are conflicted. I'm sad that Mastodon isn't working for everyone as the solution. I predict that a lot of them will move en mass move over to BlueSky once it's open to all.

@NicoleCRust @debivort

For me, Mastodon is pretty much like pre-Musk Twitter. Hardly any difference. I don't even know what people's problems are?

@brembs @NicoleCRust where are y'all on the ethics of following them through mastodon bots?

I'm torn. I still have an account on the birdsite, but only use it to reply or retweet. I'm ready to leave at any time, without any connection. I hope Musk follows through with shutting it down in Europe. Would saves me making the decision 😂
Not likely, though.

Nicole Rust Jun 2, 2023

@brembs @debivort
My personal take is that Twitter is no longer a safe space and so I can't contribute to that community and encourage others to do so. I certainly don't fault anyone from pulling the news from there (sometimes it's the only place to get it).

@NicoleCRust @brembs That's where I've been. But keeping tabs on those accounts probably lessens the social pressure for them to leave... even if it's a tiny effect, maybe it's worth it? I dunno.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

I think that is the right way to think. How can we increase the social pressure to leave?

For my part, I wrote something that I hope could help add to that pressure:

Ironically enough, it got an abstract in Nature

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00486-3

🤣

Mastodon over Mammon - Towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge

Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record – encompassing text, data and code – to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.

Zenodo

If we can get our institutions and societies to make Mastodon the official social media conduit for scholarship, wouldn't that help?

@brembs @NicoleCRust Can you tell the remaining folks it's time to go?

I already did, more than once. Didn't make me any friends 🤣

Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆 Jun 3, 2023

@debivort @brembs @NicoleCRust
I am still hosting the dept group and the lab twitter handles, difficult to cut them out🤦 but it is purely for "promoting/recruitment" related use.
For personal and science, I really get higher SNR over here

@kofanchen @debivort @NicoleCRust

Björn Brembs Jun 3, 2023

Here is another idea: those of us who still have a birdsite acount band together and all ask, at around the same time, the same question, e.g.:
"Those who are still actively posting on Twitter: what would Musk have to do for you to finally call it quits?"

Or something like that? With a hashtag #justifyMusk or similar? And the #academictwitter hashtag for increased reach?

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust Yes, establishing red lines well in advance of potentially crossing them is so valuable. We had a household discussion on this re: leaving the US if it descends into fascism. Haven't crossed it yet (arrest of political opponents on substantial scale).

Björn Brembs Jun 4, 2023

Ok, if that's the case, then let's do it. What would be catchy hashtags?

(Hope you'll never have to leave, but we'd welcome you if it happens!)

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust At a minimum it's a fun brainstorming exercise with Jennifer where we'd go.

#twitterRedLine #aMuskTooFar #whenEnoughIsEnough

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust hashtag ideas:

I dunno... I was never good at hashtags

#aMuskTooFar #twitterRedLine

This is what I have scheduled for posting to the birdsite later today:

----------------
For those of you in #scholcom still actively posting on #AcademicTwitter:

What would Musk have to do to make you leave?

--------------

Any suggestions?

Ben de Bivort Jun 6, 2023

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust should #scholcom be #scicom?

Depends on whether we want to reach scholars or just scientists?

#aMuskTooFar #twitterRedLine #scicomm

How about this:

For those of you in #scholcom still actively posting on #AcademicTwitter:

What would Musk have to do to make you leave #ScienceTwitter ?

Ben de Bivort Jun 6, 2023

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust oh, I didn't even realize that #scholcom was a thing. I thought it was just a typo. :)

This one looks good!

https://twitter.com/brembs/status/1666087298931519491

I've posted it. If you have ways to make soemone retweet it, or tweet their own copy, now would be a good time:

Björn Brembs 🇺🇦💙💛 on Twitter

“For those of you in #scholcomm still actively posting on #AcademicTwitter: What would Musk have to do to make you leave #ScienceTwitter ? Where would you go instead? #aMuskTooFar #twitterRedLine #scicomm”

Twitter

Ben de Bivort Jun 6, 2023

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust I posted it in lab slack for those of still running twitter accounts.

@kofanchen @brembs @NicoleCRust I've brought up shutting down our departmental twitter account and moving to mastodon with our comm admins. Seems like the idea might have traction.

Björn Brembs Jun 4, 2023

Excellent! Will they/ do they already have a Mastodon account?

@brembs @kofanchen @NicoleCRust Not yet, but I'm now actively advocating for the switch.

Ko-Fan Chen 陳克帆 Jun 5, 2023

@debivort @brembs @NicoleCRust
My dilemma is that I really use twitter and mastodon in a very different way, and actually I am not sure I want mastodon to become twitter, which for me is too loud and distractive.
Nonetheless, I did try to persuade colleagues who have twitter to come on board, luckily some of them are here, but sadly not posting; I feel they usually already see twitter as their compromise to social media, so another forum is one too much?

Jo Etzel Jun 2, 2023

@debivort @brembs @NicoleCRust When the bots are obviously labeled as such and only relaying public tweets, it seems fine to me, just a different way of receiving what they wrote. If the bots were making money without permission or claiming authorship that would be unethical.

@JosetAEtzel @brembs @NicoleCRust I agree with all that, but my concern was never about the ethics of using a bot, but rather that by using a bot to stay connected to folks back on twitter, I'm propping twitter up.

Jo Etzel Jun 2, 2023

@debivort @brembs @NicoleCRust Oh, I see what you were asking. Maybe the criteria is whether the bots help twitter in any way: how do they show up as "engagement"? If twitter only counts one bot "view" regardless of whether 5 or 50 people see it via mastodon, that seems better than even just two people viewing it directly on twitter.

@NicoleCRust I wonder. My working model is that it's their follower count that's keeping them there. They'd lose that in a BlueSky switch too...

* Search, especially for my own threads, so I can use them to answer the same Q
* Looking through who someone's following to find more people without needing to click multiple times
* Being able to open and follow an account via an external link
* Quote tweets
* Giphy integration (no fun allowed)
* Video upload (not links, uploads!)
* No "pick your server" technobable
* Go where the non-science followers are. Links posted to both get more clicks on Twitter.

Another big one is the attitude of "you're using mastodon wrong" that a lot of users got during the big migration 6ish months ago. It nearly turned me off from mastodon completely early on. I had to move servers because I was told I have too many followers. That is antithetical to scicom.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of positive things to say about mastodon. The edit feature alone is fantastic. But it's tough to attract the audience that science communicators want to communicate to with mastodon's cultural and technical hurdles.

Oh and I forgot the biggest one: the algorithm. Purely chronological is an algorithm, not the absence thereof. It means never having context when you see a reply. It means not being able to filter to a good summary after you've been off the site for a day or two. It makes the most interesting longer back-and-forth discussions impossible to understand unless you've been in it from the beginning.

I think bluesky has the right approach of algorithms as tabs.

I wish BlueSky had mastodon's feature of hashtag tabs too

@sharoz @debivort @NicoleCRust you're getting to the competing visions for the platform. Most recent users see it through the lens of their own desire for a "Twitter replacement". But there are a significant number of users that don't want that, in the sense of being actively opposed to it as a goal. They want it to succeed or fail on its own terms and in its own way, which implies smaller scales. I personally am agnostic in this debate.

@sharoz @debivort @NicoleCRust what I'd like to convey is my sense that this group which actively works against features and strategies to make the Fedi more Twitter-like actually do have their own well thought out and valid use cases, wants and needs in large part. While they can be prickly they're not simply being difficult or not understanding how to achieve the same goals. They think the goals you (understandably) have are bad for their use.

@mrcompletely @debivort @NicoleCRust

I agree. But I think the features I've outlined are necessary to attract a general non-techy non-scientist audience. And failure to attract them will prevent the science communicators from fully adopting mastodon as their primary platform.

It's the same debate as "Why do people use Mac/Windows when Linux is free?". A UX focus that prioritizes general users instead of techies will attract the most people irrespective of corporate malevolence.

@sharoz @debivort @NicoleCRust I agree with all that. And I'm personally not against the idea of "attracting the most general audience users" as a valid goal. It's not one I share; I'm not in your profession. But I'm not opposed to it either. But I recognize that some Fedi users are in fact directly opposed to that goal for *any* reason because they believe it will harm their own experience here. Keeping user growth slow is a *valid opposing view*

@sharoz @debivort @NicoleCRust again I don't mean to argue but just to indicate that this opposition you're seeing is not in bad faith or out of not understanding the goal. That's the only thing I'm trying to express. I wish you luck and appreciate your work and that of the whole field.

@mrcompletely @debivort @NicoleCRust

Yeah, but this thread is about science communicators.

@sharoz @debivort @NicoleCRust hm. Well. By offering a broader context my thought was that you might find a way to engage in more productive and less oppositional discussion with people who don't share your goals in hopes of finding compromise or non zero sum solutions. But if you're only interested in discussion amongst people who agree with you and already share your goals then you are likely destined for a poor experience here. Good luck though

@debivort

I have no idea what's up with these people, either!
Some say "mastodon doesn't do it for me" or "I've invested so much here", or "for me, not much has changed", but to me, that says more about the people saying stuff like that than that it excuses or explains anything?

opourquie Jun 3, 2023

@debivort Fully agree! I don’t understand how scientists can in good conscience remain in twitter.

Charrvein Jun 16, 2023

@debivort @brembs
I for one migrated, check Twitter but rarely post

got confused by mastadon, reduced my #socialmediascience participation and uptake.
Am both glad and sad about it

On your question, think some #influencials are addicted to the feedback, and thus will continue

#redlineMusk wont stop them

Reducing the feedback on Twitter n increase here will

Björn Brembs Jun 16, 2023

@apalsson @debivort

I think that's a fair assumption, probably! My subjective impression is also that (for our circles) high-follower people are overrepresented in the population that still populates the birdsite.

My feed there now consists of something like 75% organizations. My birdsite feed would be nearly empty if we could get scholarly organizations to move.