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Bluesky now platform of choice for science community
- complianceowl 1y ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 1y agoNo kidding when the other site has filled up with people who only believes statements that any smart 5 year old would think is silly. It is too bad things have got to this point, but we as voters let it happen. At least there are some countries that still value Science. The US seems to be doing all it can to hand what remains of our scientific lead to those countries.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- izzydata 1y agoIt's surprising that any serious organization or person would still use Twitter in its current state.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoNo true scotsman's fallacy - no serious person would use X; if you use X you aren't serious.
- izzydata 1y agoI don't agree. There are still serious organizations and people using Twitter. I believe that to be true. I'm just surprised they haven't moved. For example there are emergency systems or local governments that announce information on Twitter. These feel like serious organizations to me. At minimum I feel like they should be in multiple places and not just Twitter.
- djtango 1y agoUltimately Twitter is timely and has almost universal mindshare. A few weeks ago when there was the pacific earthquake, I had family who were very close to a danger zone vacationing. Google was not sufficient for finding good local timely info as an outsider but twitter was. I would never even think to check BlueSky or Mastodon, and my family will never have heard of them.
- izzydata 1y agoThings have to be posted in those other places for your regular person to have a chance of hearing about them eventually. If everyone waits for some adoption threshold to support something then it will never reach that threshold.
- fxwin 1y agoThis makes no sense, the comment obviously implies that there are in fact serious orgs using twitter
- pessimizer 1y agoThe question that motivated the comment obviously implies that this is unbelievable for undisclosed reasons (related to its "current state.") Smarter to argue with the premise than the fluff.
- gyanchawdhary 1y ago[flagged]
- svantana 1y agoNo true scotsman fallacy - only lefties downvote this comment, and if you downvote the comment you must be a leftie.
- gyanchawdhary 1y agolol, clever point you made there
- metamet 1y agoWell, if it helps you feel better, the downvotes are probably because it's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. And yours are probably due to your endorsement of it and whining about "lefties".
- gyanchawdhary 1y ago[flagged]
- znpy 1y agoIt's surprising that any serious organization used it at all. It was never a good place to spend your time really. It's sad that the science community is just moving to another walled garden rather than spawning its own network of federated ActivityPub services (eg: mastodon). Bluesky seems to be based on an open protocol (AT Protocol), but how actually interoperable is that ? I can't find a list of non-bluesky AT protocol servers that can interoperate with Bluesky.
- SketchySeaBeast 1y agoIt was a good place to get messages out quickly - if I wanted to know that my cable company knew the internet was down, either from their direct acknowledgement or people sending messages to them, I went there. But now that I need an account to even see the comments or posts it's impractical to use.
- Telemakhos 1y agoBack in the 90s, every University had its own mailserver, USENET server, etc. These offered authentication to any user in the University, and each was federated with other institutions and the internet as a whole. I'm surprised Universities haven't set up a federated network of ActivityPub servers, with each University hosting its faculty and student accounts on its server. The signal-to-noise ratio of a University-only network would be amazing.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago> The signal-to-noise ratio of a University-only network would be amazing Ha; no. It would be students self-censoring to avoid anything that could draw a universities' ire... while they meet up on Discord to share their actual thoughts, cheating techniques, personal feelings, and date nights. It would be University LinkedIn.
- noirscape 1y agoThere's exactly three reasons for people to stick to Twitter: * They don't care/agree with the policies of the guy running it. * Legacy reasons; either they have no reason to leave (automated org accounts keep running until something in the workflow breaks) or they have an existing community that doesn't want to move. This group will eventually leave but is currently stuck with inertia. Most "public service" accounts are in this category. * And finally, for artists, Bluesky is undesirable as a platform because it has some very aggressive image compression compared to Twitter (2000x2000 is the absolute limit). Some are dualposting to Bluesky, but are unlikely to fully leave Twitter for this reason. Finally, I'll note that while accounts are generally abandoning Twitter, this doesn't automatically mean they're moving to Bluesky either. A lot of those service accounts just up and vanished and just said "well, go visit our website".
- anonzzzies 1y ago> * They don't care/agree with the policies of the guy running it. I don't care, I care that even though I follow/get followed by CS / Math people and still see mostly far right / nazi / trump /crypto comments about everything. In even small threads about very technical stuff, always people come up with the most crazy shit. And these days the almost mandatory 'Grok, is this true/profound/worth anything/etc'. It's just annoying and maybe I shouldn't care. Don't have that experience on other platforms (mostly same following/followers as they are also there).
- the_snooze 1y agoEver since Musk took over Twitter, the replies have been useless. It used to be that you can follow replies as a discussion. Now, the replies are a mix of unmarked ads, bots, and weird call-outs to Grok, and maybe all at the same time. All the automation and algorithmic garbage crowd out actual human discussion. It's a big reason why I stopped using Twitter myself. If they want to optimize for bots and weirdos driving up engagement numbers, go for it. But that's not a service that brings me value.
- summermusic 1y agoOn the note of artists, I always wondered why so many artists don't use a proper gallery/portfolio in addition to social media. This could be a general art-sharing platform, one of the many niche- or fandom-specific gallery sites, or their own website. Get the audience and reach through social media, but link back to a portfolio with the originals for those who care.
- runjake 1y agoX really sucks in it's current state, but it's where the things I'm interested in happen or are discussed first (eg AI state of the art, bootstrappers). There's a bunch of tech people I follow who aren't on BlueSky, Threads, etc. Interestingly, when I glance at my Bluesky feed once a month or so, it's a lot of complaining about everything. I think I hear more about Elon on Bluesky than I do X. And yeah, I follow reasonably high-value people. That said, I keep some sort of X exit plan in place, and I look at it a lot less than before. When the signal vs noise value shifts, I'll be done, but I'm not quite there yet.
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- gjsman-1000 1y agoBluesky is still trending downward in activity and has been losing popularity over the last year. https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- nomilk 1y agoThis is extremely interesting. Didn't know of these stats. Would be great to be able to have twitter, mastodon and bluesky on the same graph (perhaps with different y-axes to allow comparison of their relative trends)
- ozmodiar 1y agoThreads is the one really taking off. Personally I'm not thrilled at Meta and Zuckerberg increasing their stranglehold on social media, but it seems to be the way things are going.
- nomilk 1y agoI haven't seen the stats but suspect Threads may appear to have high growth because it's starting from such a low base.
- Finnucane 1y agoThe weird thing about that is that very little from Threads seems to bleed out to other places. Does anything actually interesting happen there?
- octernion 1y agoas a threads user since the beginning and a big fan of the platform, my answer is strongly "no." which is my favorite reason to be there and i hope it doesn't change. it's full of instagram and facebook users, which to use the common parlance, are all "normies." it's full of normal people have normal opinions in small spaces. there's very little viral posts or bits or memes that are carried outwards. that being said dril started posting again there recently as have some other bigger ex weird twitter people so who knows.
- thaack 1y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
- FlyingSnake 1y ago>They ended up with a final sample size of 813 people. I want BlueSky to succeed but this sampling bias is simply too much to ignore. This comment (by nunobrito) from few days ago on a similar topic is best analysis of this topic. > These news are awfully similar to click-bait stating "the science is settled" by grouping a small set of the group and then pretending it represents the whole. The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario). Therefore the paper only seems biased on its best scenario or downright propaganda at its worst. > NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44982510
- epistasis 1y agoWhat is the sampling bias? You dont explain what it could be, and your quote doesn't give any clues about what the bias could be.
- FlyingSnake 1y agoThe article itself talks about this self-selection/sampling bias due to a minuscule sample size of 813 people. Reducing “science community” to such a small sample is not convincing.
- epistasis 1y agoSelf-selections, sure, that's a risk with any and all surveys and questionnaires, which must be mentioned. But 813? Why wouldn't that be enough? Basic stats puts that at a very healthy number for most questions, and the researchers don't raise any questions about bias about the number.
- pessimizer 1y ago> The paper failed both to identify the overall number of scientists using X or the cases where multiple platforms are used (most common scenario)
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 1y agoFWIW, Bluesky still seems unfriendly to email alias providers. I never managed to create an account on Bluesky as one of their support email blocks certain email domains. They still have a long way to go.
- andunie 1y agoIt's so odd that they still get to enjoy their status as a "decentralized" "open" social network when it's really just a centralized platform by definition (and it's not even their fault, there is simply no way to do what they want to do without centralization). Sure, someone may say "the AT Protocol is open", but that means nothing because the AT Protocol is not Bluesky, Bluesky is one centralized platform that happens to "talk" that protocol (well, of course, since the "protocol" is literally defined by whatever they happen to be doing), it still controls who can be inside and who can't. TL;DR: Nostr is a much better option for most use cases, sadly for some unfortunate reason it never got to enjoy too much attention from a wider technologist community.
- pfraze 1y agoNostr is just an under specified atproto that doesn’t work very well
- andunie 1y agoCan you expand on that? In my understanding it is a completely different approach.
- psionides 1y agoYou're free to set up your own PDS (which is super easy) and use Bluesky through it, and it works just fine (or even better if the PDS is close to you)
- andunie 1y agoNo, because Bluesky the platform has to actively crawl my PDS, and it can freely decide to not do that.
- nomilk 1y agoCan't help but notice arstechnica seems to have an anti-Elon agenda. I recall them posting articles claiming Twitter's content was important for historical reasons (agree on that) and would disappear once Elon took over, which afaik, didn't happen.
- mistercheph 1y agoowned by conde nast its just normal MSM stuff
- nomilk 1y agoAh, yup. Didn't know this. > Condé Nast media brands include Vogue, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Pitchfork, Wired, Bon Appétit, and Ars Technica, among many others. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond%C3%A9_Nast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cond%C3%A9_Nast
- epistasis 1y agoX hides discussions. If somebody sends you a link you can't see the discussion without an account and logging in and being extensively tracked. Not sure what you mean about anti-Elon bias. This was straightforward reporting of the truth. If reality has an anti-Elon bias then perhaps it's not bias.
- thatoneguy 1y agoReality has an anti-Elon bias
- conradfr 1y agoBefore the take over you couldn't see the linked tweet at all. (it was not always this way though)
- epistasis 1y agoI don't believe that's true, in that visibility only disappeared after Musk's takeover. It's hard to find old news with modern search engines, but here's one article from 2023, post-Elon, that matches my memory: > If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you’ll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you’ll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23779764/twitter-blocks-unregistered-users-account-tweets https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/23779764/twitter-blocks-u... It looks like it was pushed through by claiming the site was under attack, and then access was never restored. In any case, it was one of the things that pushed me off X.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- epistasis 1y agoAmong all the major technical benefits of Bluesky over Twitter listed in the article, I'd add two more: * links to external web pages (your paper, your blog, your new dataset, etc.) won't cause your posts to be suppressed * Bluesky discussions are accessible to the open web These two features are absolutely essential for science, and perhaps if X was more like Twitter on free speech and openness to the web then scientists wouldn't have moved away.
- hk1337 1y agoReading through the comments makes it seem like Bluesky is the Titantic and it's proponents are the orchestra on board.
- epistasis 1y agoAny news article that could be interpreted as critical of Musk these days seems to have a broad army of commenters that swarm to add low information critique of critique. This article is likely to be flagged off the front page very quickly too. Edit: yes, and as predicted, this straightforward reporting on the scientific community's migration of social networks has been flagged off the front page, because too many HN folks can not distinguish bad news for Musk from biased against Musk. There's no reason for this to be flagged except for the political motivations od the flashers.
- mountainriver 1y agoI found Bluesky to be extremely hostile to AI and mostly far leftists canabalizing each other. I don’t see it as sustainable and fewer people are using it. X is undoubtedly worse but Bluesky doesn’t appear to be the answer.
- zzzeek 1y agoim there, I use Claude every day, am not a far leftist. come on over and there will be two of us.
- zahlman 1y agoThat's been my experience of most Mastodon instances, too (except the ones explicitly created to counter that, which don't tend to get much traction).
- Finnucane 1y agoI follow some actual far-leftists on Mastodon, and they would probably find your assessment of Bluesky to be pretty funny.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI don’t know that “AI hostile” is quite accurate. It’s more like it’s not blindly accepted and praised, which is different. Generally any hostility comes down to cases where it’s replacing or could replace people instead of bringing a new capabilities to the table — AI helping detect cancer or discover new treatments for example is a lot more accepted than AI taking the jobs of book cover illustrators, for example. That… kind of makes sense? It’s logical that applications with significant downside, particularly that which impacts peoples’ livelihood, would get greater questioning and pushback. If anything I’d call into question a platform where nobody is asking these questions and wants to charge ahead with zero regard to potential ramifications.
- epistasis 1y agoThere's a big difference between the grifters in AI and the builders. Grifters of all sorts quickly get pigeonholed in Bluesky off into separate communities. There are some builders of AI on BlueSky but far fewer. It's mostly the other sciences that have migrated, because X actively suppressed that type of content on X. Its not uncommon for a Bluesky scientist to have 10x the engagement on Bluesky with a tiny fraction of the followers.
- hingusdingus 1y agoAfter this I expect to see a similar article saying the same for "real" scientists that go to truth social. With a sample size of 100.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoLast week: Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
- iowemoretohim 1y ago> It's not just you. Survey says: "Twitter sucks now and all the cool kids are moving to Bluesky" Ars Technica
- xyzzzzzzz 1y ago[dead]