Yeah, I read it yesterday I think. US citizen lives in Las Vegas and her German boyfriend comes to visit. They travel to Mexico and then were both detained on the way back in. She was released within days, he spent weeks even after volunteering to just go back to Germany. Fucking nuts.

OpenAI promised us PhD agents! Only 20k a month!

Loose leaf!

Leaf blower

Paperclips hold papers together. Leaf blower blows them all over the place

Operation crayon

In the context of Dawkins meme, this post is definitely a meme!

idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning

If we consider scientists imitating the behavior of other scientists (ex: leaving the us) combined with the social network post (signifying the symbolic meaning), it checks all the correct boxes to me!

Would another peer review my analysis?

It's pretty likely they've heard of it as a niche option, as a forgettable factoid years ago.

Then they may also have learned it's a very small platform and something about decentralization.

if they went to sign up regardless, it seems likely they didn't end up picking an instance. (Possibly having left the page open, briefly looked up Mastodon instances and read a few sentences, then moved on to something else.)

Now that they wouldn't have had to pick an instance, they've long forgotten about it, maybe you could get them to try the normalized sign up process.

But anyone who knows anything about people knew from the start that Mastodon wasn't really even aiming for successful growth. Of course the instances were gonna be an obstacle.