Ulrike Hahnnew article in Science on academic Bluesky
by @kakape
Frank Sonntag@UlrikeHahn @kakape
(this is my personal opinion, not an official position of FediScience e.V.)
On the one hand it's good that people just move off X, but I do feel a soupcon of personal disappointment that they mostly seem to prefer the next shiny thing without really considering the long term prospects and how their new network is run. (And I realize that this feeling is probably because of a typical do-gooder attitude that doesn't understand why people just don't want what I think is good for them:)
But the last paragraph in the linked article is pretty poignant. Currently BS does not have a real sustainable business model, it's all investor money. Their board doesn't want ads and hopefully they find a different way to make money, but who knows.
So, can we learn from BS' apparent attraction to make sure the Fediverse stays around as an option? Do we need to make changes or is enough to just be there and keep doing 'the right thing'?
If there are particular ideas how we can make the Fediverse more interesting for scientists (new Mastodon features or connected service platforms etc), I'd be interested to hear them.
Ellyse@UlrikeHahn @kakape @FrankSonntag maybe we should get rid of the edit message feature 😅 but more seriously I think their client is a bit smoother. I haven’t deconstructed it but it might be useful to do so. I wonder how much the signing up process is a deterrent also.
@ellyxir my guess is that most of the discussion of why people prefer one over the other, or -alternatively- what’s ‘wrong’ with Mastodon- focusses too much on what people explicitly state as their ‘reasons’. When you ask people for reasons why they did something, they choose things that are easy and comfortable to say. Those things might or might not have played a meaningful causal role in their actions. That’s a picture psychology has delivered over and over in empirical studies. That’s not to say we should ignore stated reasons, but I feel like I’ve seen too much dissonance between behaviour and statements in the great (and ongoing) social media migrations to give the latter too much weight.
Titus von der Malsburg 📖👀ðŸ’@UlrikeHahn @kakape Bluesky was founded and is run by hardcore libertarians. Many of the people who think they found a new home there are in for a rough awakening.
@tmalsburg @kakape I’m inclined to agree. It’s already started: the AI training set, Jesse Singal’s presence, are issues prompting upset there that strike me as following directly from fundamental design choices (i.e., all data and content are public, for any third party, for whatever purpose; composable moderation as choose-your-own-adventure).
Those core design features have consequences at odds with core values of many on the platform, and it will be interesting to see how that tension plays out.