Technology

What does this mean? "Good" how?

Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.

BlueSky is specifically designed as a drop-in Twitter replacement, it’s an easy transition, and tons of Twitter users have been advertising it for a long time. The Fediverse is comparatively obscure.

The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?

Most people will not have any way to answer that without knowing what the downstream impact will be. Mastodon people are working on smoothing that down, but it's still a pretty fraught question. And if half a given community ends up on one server and half on another, they get fragmented and conversations and followers fizzle out.

Bluesky wants to tell people they're not a single-node lock-in to avoid the Twitter effect, but it turns out that's their key advantage.

The only thing that will guarantee they don't end up like Twitter is if they revamp their corporate governance mechanisms, but they had to take VC money and haven't come up with a long-term revenue model, so it's not clear how they can avoid it.

I would assume the same reason anyone chooses it over the fediverse, because they want their content to be easily discoverable.

The fediverse just doesn’t have the audience nor ease of use to be the smart investment for most people, at least in the short term.

In the long term, I believe the fediverse would be the right move. However most people struggle to think long-term outside of their own fields, and scientists are not immune to this phenomenon.

It costs time and money. The handful of times I published articles in an open access journal, I had to pay close to $5K USD per publication.

Theoretically, researchers can publish on Mastodon or something similar but that unfortunately won’t give us the reach we need. That might be fine with well established names, but for dumb-dumbs like myself who are still trying to make a name for ourselves in our field, we want the highest impact publisher we can find. Those typically come with a price tag.

Sometimes the grant also dictates acceptable publishers where you can submit your manuscript.

Sadly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Because Bluesky keeps to what made Twitter popular in the first place. The UX. You make a post and its syndicated to a federated feed that anyone can search for, and you can tag content using hashtags.

It's a great concept. There's a reason a lot of people use it.

I'm on both and Mastodon is missing (at least in any easy to use way) most of the features that make Bluesky such a good destination:

• instant add subscribe lists
• subscribable block lists
• custom feeds/subscribable algorithms
• keyword/topic blocks
• nuclear block where you never see the blocked person again
• optional discover feed
• DM preferences

All these things (and more I'm sure I'm forgetting), make Bluesky very quick to get started with and very powerful for honing your feeds to be exactly how you want and free of harassment and trolling.

I am still trying with Mastodon, but it's really slow going and I can fully understand why people wouldn't bother. After a year I am way behind where I was in a week with Bluesky.