Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
A new survey suggests that scientists vastly prefer Bluesky to X - and to its other alternatives.
[Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica]
The Bluesky / AT protocol ecosystem is still fairly small, but it’s telling that demographics like scientists, journalists, and writers are moving there. It doesn’t need to be the “global town square” (something that never really existed) to succeed; if it becomes a conduit for communities of knowledge workers, researchers, and culture creators, that works too. If it’s left-leaning, that’s not because it’s a bubble; it’s, frankly, because, by today’s standards, facts and research have a liberal bias.
As David Shiffman, a scientist who ran a survey confirming that scientists prefer Bluesky, put it:
“I don’t care about this, because I don’t use social media to argue with strangers about politics. I use social media to talk about fish. When I talk about fish on Bluesky, people ask me questions about fish. When I talk about fish on Twitter, people threaten to murder my family because we’re Jewish.”
The slightly confounding thing is that this was Mastodon’s to lose: there are scientific communities there too, and its open source, federated nature theoretically makes it even safer and more welcoming for the science community (particularly as science-based instances can set their own rules). I’d love to dig into why Bluesky became the favorite; my assumption is that it’s fundamentally easier to understand, having taken its design and functional cues from Twitter. But it could also be that the overhead of finding and running instances is just too great.
Regardless, it’s great that these communities are making the leap to the open social web. (Recent moves in the ecosystem have shown that, yes, Bluesky / ATproto is open, despite some detractors on the Mastodon side particularly.) And with tools like Bridgy Fed, it doesn’t matter if you prefer one protocol and they prefer another, because you can all follow each other and interact anyway. That’s the beauty of open ecosystems; the open social web is one thing, even if parts of it use different underlying technology.
[Link]
