Okay, so some observations after a week of social media turmoil:
- A LOT of #LawTwitter people (including a fair number of law profs) migrated to Bluesky last weekend.
- It appears that many of them already had invite codes but didn't use them until Twitter melted down (again).
- Related: At least one of my friends noted that during the last Great Migration (November) they weren't really sure Twitter would implode, so they weren't ready to jump (or fully jump) quite yet
- To my mind, the last point means that what we saw in some quarters wasn't so much a rejection of the fedi as much as a timing/perception issue
- So, depending on what happens over there in the future, those people may ultimately be persuadable to try the fedi (or try it again)
- But, for now, the mass of people over there creates an undeniable gravitational pull for law people
- To be clear: I still believe in the fedi and strongly prefer Mastodon to Bluesky as a platform
- But I think it's worth thinking about why people are making the choices they are making now
- To that end, I haven't seen any law friends saying that search or quoting are what make them prefer Bluesky.
- Instead, I've heard more about timing (see above) and perceived difficulty of onboarding.
- I've also seem comments to the effect that some people just want a place where they can scroll a bit and find interesting content, without taking the time/energy to build up a follow list. No judgment here; just observing the different preferences
@design_law I'm not a particularly vocal person and I've only been on Mastodon for a couple days, but I'm enjoying the feel of what I've found so far.
I hope you and others like you keep doing what you're doing. There are surely more like me that appreciate it, even if we're not particularly noisy about it.
@design_law Things do seem to be fragmenting, with folks finding their own groups in various spots.
But for those of us who surfed all over Twitter, in law and science and tech and weather and politics and dogs and local news… well it feels like you can no longer find it all.
A couple of months may make things clearer.
@design_law The people looking to not follow anyone should really learn about the local and federated feed where you peek at posts from accounts who other people are following.
Also, following hashtags can deliver lots of content without having to follow anyone.
Then there is the absolute explosion of Lemmy / KBin, so now you can follow a few communities / magazines and receive more posts and comments than you can read in a single day.
I should also give a hat tip to @icymi_law, because following that account routinely shows me interesting posts that I might not see otherwise.
Good job @Colarusso!
@design_law on that last point, I seem to remember old-twitter claimed that a significant percentage of people never switched from the algorithmic "for you" feed.
Don't understand that preference myself, but it's been clear for awhile that content discovery is a big blocker for many people.
Most of us didn't know you could switch off the "For you" algorithm, saw it and forgot, or got lazy and never followed up. 🤷♂️
I've never lacked for content on Mastodon, but I set up an account on one of the main instances that I use to surf the local and federated feeds and followed a LOT of accounts early on. It meets my needs, such as they are.
@design_law I have used the search function pretty regularly on BlueSky and hope FT search eventually shows up here. While I don't prefer BS to Mastodon, this is a quality of life feature I miss here.
Quote Retweets over there seems to be feeding a lot of the dunking that contributed to some of the toxicity on Twitter and has given me a better appreciation for the Mastodon devs' aversion to QTs, bearing in mind it's productive uses.
This view may be obnoxious to most lawyers, so give me a good reason to believe otherwise...
I've contended that the necessity to be able to defend either side of a legal issue, in law school, removes the metric of morality for academic purposes. And regardless of the personal ethics qualifications to graduate & enter the bar, the sense of the propriety of a morality is never academically reinjected.
The same moral dispassion is being used in the selection of social media sites. The migration is not toward sites that reflect common community morality (i.e., away from sites that cater to inflammation, extremism, and creating bigotries), but toward those that provide the most extensive professional opportunity.
In short, I think there are many businesses that give little thought to the strength of good media leadership and reasonable conversation, in deference to profit, of which lawyering is one.
Absolutely, 100%. I think the same & think you nailed it.
I've no law school experience. There were a couple of 'law for commanders' courses I had to take (and was mediocre in), but the issues there were skew to what I brought up here. I've known a number of lawyers, most excellent people, but a couple of which have been disbarred, and I'm drawing from conversations with and observations of those individuals. Thank you for a comprehensive reply.
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