In some fields of science, such as physics and machine learning, I’m finding that Twitter has gotten only *more* important in the past few months. My principled refusal to use that platform is beginning to hurt me professionally; I’m missing out on important discussions (including about my own articles). I’ve had some great exchanges on Mastodon and value the relationships I’ve forged here, but, as much as it pains me to say this, it’s just not the same. What can we do to fix this?
@gmusser - there are currently many things about Mastodon that make it unable to serve as a Twitter substitute. They are well analyzed here:
https://blog.bloonface.com/2023/06/12/why-did-the-twittermigration-fail/
If I were a journalist I'd be in a bind. As a late-career mathematical physicist I decided to spend less time on social media and more time thinking. It's been a boon!
@johncarlosbaez @gmusser I wouldn't look for an unique selling point in mastodon in general, but in particular servers. I am certainly more willing to experiment than average users, but I am happy with my journey so far. Initially, I didn't know which server to join (luckily all mastodon.social type of names I tried were not accepting new subscriptions) so I went for one by the name: main criterion was that it's short. Turned out mine was the one instance that allows you to follow the local threads of other instances, and now I follow about a dozen specialist servers.
See this for the feature in question https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/19819
