Academic Twitter is on the decline. Will Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn etc be able to replace it, or is this online community dying forever?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0
@samharrison7 The consensus in most of the academic community is that #Mastodon doesn't have a good enough on-boarding process and it leaves users feeling isolated on little islands. It would be a shame for #science and the potential future of #ScienceCommunication if the opportunity is missed to get most scientists onto a free, open, federated platform, but alas I feel it is unlikely it will happen unless some serious changes are made.
I will epilog by saying I quite enjoy Mastodon, but that is only because a good chunk of the #FOSS and #RSEng community seem to have made it here, and I have put quite a bit of time into learning how it works.
@mattasdata @samharrison7
I'm quite web/computer techie and having trouble setting myself up in fediverse since 2018. Not that I don't have capabilities to do so - I can quickly research and set-up my satisfying island like You do but due to empathy and belief that no one shouldn't be left off, I'm trying to do so through glasses of those that aren't techie and come from silo solutions. E.g. scientist.
They can have successes but coming from platforms that does it better they're left in feeling they're missing something eg. "It's hard to figure out where folks are hanging at" - from article. Not a good feeling in context of professional development.
I like my take on fediverse: kids started a change with strong solution-first approach that gave them an idea of some problem, where the other way around it's how it's mostly done for significant improvement.
