The Bluesky science feed sounds like a great idea in principle … but what I seem to get from it is less like a distillation of passionate, informed sci-comm and more like a firehose of fluff.
Everyone posting on it has been verified to be a working scientist, so I guess that filters out a large proportion of crackpots wanting to tell you their theories of everything, but it turns out that thousands of scientists blurting out things at random has a very low chance of being interesting to me. “My student won a prize! Our group got funding! I photographed this mushroom!”
And that’s just the posts that are actually science adjacent, not the people who decide this would be a good place to tell you about “my favourite Jane Austen fanfics!”
Of course, anything and everything people post on social media is fine; if you don’t like their feed, you don’t have to follow them. But I’m not sure what the point is of an amalgamated “science feed” when it’s just the merged feeds of people who happen to be scientists talking about whatever.
@gregeganSF The "science" feed is largely pointless. The "Physics" feed is marginally better. Still, nothing beats curating who you are following and looking at the feeda once in a while to check if there is someone there worth following you didn't know about.
@j_bertolotti @gregeganSF Honestly, I think it's still better that the Mastodon equivalent, looking at the #science hashtag. But the bigger selling point for the Bluesky approach is that due to the design of algorithmic choice, in principle people can offer better-curated science feeds in the future (by some combination of algorithmic and manual curation), whereas following #science or #physics here will continue to work just as poorly in the future.
