Scientists move to Bluesky, transitioning away from X and Meta platforms
A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
I mean, I hate BlueSky too, but I think the reason it's more popular than Mastodon is that it's more centralized and in practical terms that means it's easier to adopt and engage with.
The biggest headache I have with Mastodon (and Lemmy, to a lesser extent) is defederation. I understand it's the most practical thing to do sometimes, but it's waaay overdone. Like, there needs to be a culture of only defederating as a last resort due to pratical concerns (e.g. bots I guess). Unfortunately the current culture is one where many instance admins treat defederation as a personal blocklist. I wish more admins would leave it to individual users to decide who to allow or not.
When you sign up with Bluesky, it gives you the choice to sign up with the big main server or with an auxiliary server. Just like Lemmy does.
The problem is that when Lemmy got hit with a big influx of users, the main server couldn't handle the load, so they quit accepting new users. This confused and upset a lot of people, because now they had to go shopping for another instance to apply to, and many of the bigger ones weren't accepting new users, either, because of the same problem. This was a crucial moment for the adoption of the platform, and the infrastructure just wasn't there to handle it.
EDIT: Shit, I think I'm misremembering that. That's what happened with Mastodon. Although, it could've happened with Lemmy, too. In fact, it's a problem with all of these social networks that aren't run by gigantic corporations. People expect a certain level of service, and you can't provide that unless you have a ton of money.
I never had a Xitter account so take what I say with a grain of salt, as I only interacted with the platform as a spectator.
For me it was funny to watch as I slowly saw people dive into madness over the most irrelevant things.
It didn’t matter if it was left or right people still lost all senses over unimportant things like Hunter Biden’s laptop or this week’s conspiracy theory.
I opened Mastodon and as I scroll through I see the following order:
And I get it, republican is bad, but after reading 3-4 republic bad posts my mental state needs a break or something different which is what Xitter was able to do. Some new music being announced/discussed, maybe a video game, maybe a joke.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
I personally think that the problem is rooted in defederation, it’s being used willy-nilly like it doesn’t have effect on the people using the platform. But not becoming an echo chamber is essential to a platform’s long term health. If I know that a platform has the same message for me when I open the app I’ll just start using it less, which is what happened with Lemmy sadly, I open my feed and it’s full of dystopian and republican posts, I just don’t bother anymore.
Incoherent rant over.
Your rant is 100% sensible and/or valid and/or based or whatever one says these days.
If a user wants their own echo chamber, let them cultivate it themselves. The hosts should not decide for them, and the choice to defederate should be based on practical/material/legal concerns only.
I think you need to curate your feeds better. My experience doesn't match yours.
BS suffers from the same issue, no variation in the content is what makes me not want to partake.
Isn't the whole thing about BlueSky that your feed is your feed though? You actively select and curate what you want. So if you want new music, games, comedy - follow new music, games, and comedy. Sure, those accounts might then post other things sometimes, but by and large, that's my understanding of BSky.
I haven't used Mastodon, but if it's anything like Lemmy, most people won't want to bother learning what an instance is or what federation means.
FOSS enthusiasts regularly overestimate how much hassle regular people are willing to put up with to do something, and how much they care about corporations.
To me the biggest issue with federated platforms is defederation: deliberately breaking interoperability.
Like, imagine if email servers (the original federated network) blocked whole domains as aggressively Mastodon or even Lemmy servers do? It never would have worked.
They planned ahead to make it popular, twitter developed it while losing money, my conspiracy theory is their goal was always to transition to bluesky since its model is more sustainable for long term control
That isn't a conspiracy theory. That was, in fact, the original plan. Jack Dorsey explicitly stated this from the outset. However, due to reasons (Wikipedia doesn't go into specifics), the project lead decided to make Bluesky independent from Twitter. When Musk bought Twitter, he severed all ties.
Going to play devil's advocate here.
Bluesky is just...better than any Fediverse microblogging platform. In terms of UI, discoverability, and keeping a balance of users in the community.
Mastodon sucks for regular people. And none of the other better platforms like Firefish ever gain enough steam to beat Mastodon because of existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub (this also includes Mastodon itself to an extent).
Mastodon is great.
The only reason why it doesn't get as much traction is because it doesn't manipulate your dopamine and serotonin receptors like other networks do with their black box algorithms that are designed to steal as much of your attention as possible, while almost certainly throwing you into an unhealthy filterbubble/echochamber.
That is also true to Bluesky, and to a lesser extent, even for the Lemmy-Reddit divide. I've seen people leaving the alternative platforms for the mainstream ones, because the alternative ones "didn't made them stay as long". For me, being less addictive was part of the reason why I prefer the alt platforms, although with reddit, I had to browse through a lot of garbage already, long before the API drama.
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.
what are those?
existing issues in the structure of the Fediverse and ActivityPub
The other issue is, nobody is trying to take on Facebook. Not really anything in the FLOSS community like it.
There's a couple contenders but they're not very good. I think most FOSS people don't WANT a facebook alternative; they'd prefer to keep their IRL identity separate from the internet. And the people who don't care also don't care enough to want to go federated.
There's spacehey as a myspace alternative though. That's pretty neat but it's full of teenagers unfortunately.
I believe you've hit the nail on the head, the only people I've noticed that really want such a social media account are generally people who were older than millennial, out of Millennials, gen Z and gen A, I don't really see much interest in a social media account that is directly linked to your actual identity. Most of them are more interested in a pseuado-anonymous style account that only asks for a username and doesn't actually link you to a real world identity.
Facebook was great in principle, it was intended as like a college student community and evolved from there, it was never meant to fill the goal of what the platform is doing today.
As such as Facebook deteriorates, there isn't a huge demand for a Facebook alternative, because the people who are leaving the platform aren't actively seeking to replace what is lost.
Non-EU folk - this website won’t open in EU because they don’t want to follow our local user privacy protections. What they’re going to do with your data? Who knows.
But yeah, you're 100% right.
man that is so cheeky of them!
Instead of abiding with the law, they just chose to block content altogether 🥲
I feel like scientists should move towards open source solutions ... I feel like most scientists are smart enough to launch a mastodon server, but well.
Most scientists aren't allowed to do stuff like that, or purely just don't have the time.
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.
Bluesky is open source though
No, aspects of the Bluesky system are open source. The moderation and filtering layer is effectively centralized, is specifically not clarified to leave open the possibility for monetization such as forcing ads on users, and even if you could theoretically run your own Bluesky network... it would never be a useful alternative to the Official Bubble maintained by the Bluesky corporation that you must submit to or be left out in the cold interacting with users only on alternate, small personal networks.
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
I use linux because I hate microsoft, not because it's more feature complete than windows (it isn't).
I use lemmy because I hate u/spez, not because it's more feature complete than reddit (it isn't).
I use blender because it's free and it's actually kinda great, if all free and open source software was like blender, then it would be a no-brainer to use FOSS all of the time, and it would be easy to convince the normies to do the same.
also also
I'm using linux mint, i have minor complaints about it, but nothing worse than what microsoft is currently doing with windows. It's just different, and that bothers me. middle click paste is the bane of my existence, but other people swear by it. Just before I switched over, I learned about windows 10's built in emoji keyboard, and I really liked that. A year later (literally last week) I discovered a program that does most of what the windows emoji thingy did, and I can manually edit a keybind for the function to accomplish amost the same thing. FOSS, yay, it's free if you don't value your time in currency amounts. FOSS could be so good if only it were good.
while I agree, the reality of the situation is that when you get down to comparing feature to feature, open source solutions tend to be technically inferior to proprietary ones.
Yes. But there is nothing bluesky does that mastodon doesn't. It's a platform to write short text posts and have it viewed by other people. It's not rocket science.
Some of us have. There are a few science focused servers.
Never worked in academia eh? Plenty of dumb (and, more importantly here, computer illiterate) people there too.
I'm pretty sure there are a handful of technically literate scientists who are able to install servers lmao.
Never meet your heroes. If a scientist is human, they're as fallible as any other. Just like some teachers aren't there because they're passionate. Some legitimately are bad if you ever had parent teacher conferences. Not passion nor intelligence saves you from making poor choices
Most people who work as "scientists" aren't actually scientists.
Define "Scientist".
Would be better if it was Mastodon, but I suppose I shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, and good riddance to Twitter, indeed.
While there has been some onboarding QOL stuff for mastodon, Bluesky still has them beat on that.
The "People" segment in the explore menu is a nice start, but it's still dependent on the users picking a server that somewhat matches their interests.
thing is lot of that is on purpose. mastodon and fediverse are more of an attempt to come back to the state where there is no algorithm picking for you... but too many people nowdays are simply too lazy to search and actively choose what they want to see.
what we really need is to separate content (keep that in fediverse) and content access and presentation (the interface people use to access the content). if you want a bot feeding you content whole day and for your internet to become a tv you nobody can stop you. but if you want to think amd search nobody should stop you either
Same here, well said. Bluesky’s not perfect, at least it’s not Twitter. I wish more people would use it though
Good. Sucks that it took open fascism to get that to happen, but at least it happened.
Agreed, at least it's happening with Meta too.
wait.. is it? dont threaten me with a good time
Sort of like how they moved out of Florida and Texas. Repubs want a brain drain for some reason.
Why are they selecting BlueSky over the Fediverse?
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.
also mainstream professionals are going to bluesky, like press and corp PR. big step towards critical mass.
And it's ridiculous because the difference between Mastodon and Twitter is minuscule.
I remember following some popular Twitter Head. Someone made a fake account on Mastodon and started getting followers but only posted once. Since then, his followers have grown to around 11k without any content at all! Imagine if it had been a real account. But the Twitter Head would rather switch to Bluesky instead. Such bullshit.
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.
For a long time now, the entry point to mastodon (joinmastodon.org) has had the default option as being "join mastodon.social", with an option to choose a different server delegated to a secondary button. This compares to bsky, which shows you a dropdown of servers to choose from, defaulting to "bluesky social".
It's a tiny difference in UI; both have a default and offer an alternative. Why do people say it's difficult on mastodon, while bluesky users are apparently not confused by the same option? Even if the option on bsky is basically a joke so far.
an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This question is extremely easy to answer. We all did it. I don't think people on Lemmy are some kind of master race. smh.
The Fediverse experience starts with an unanswerable question: what server do you want to be on?
This is such a cop out and makes no sense. A "server" is basically just a website. The only reason we call them servers/instances is because they are are running the same software in the background and can communicate with each other - that's it. So we put them all under common flags such as "Mastodon" for those who use the Mastodon "template", and "Fediverse" for all the "templates" that can communicate with each other.
This is literally just a problem with marketing and communication, people hear "instances"/"servers" and they shit themselves because they can't be bothered to do a bit of research. In reality they are just different websites that can communicate with each other. You have the "shakedown.social" website, the "dads.cool" website, the "bookwyrm.social" website, and plenty of others; they are all Twitter clones (Mastodon) and they all allow you to see the content posted on the others.
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.
I don't understand why people ask this. Most people you talk to on Lemmy will say they don't want the userbase to grow much more than it has because with that growth comes the other problems that larger platforms like shitter and reddit have.
That's true by and large and we also don't have enough moderators here as is.
And for reasons I don't understand, people keep asking why mainstream media outlets, influencers, and other trusted accounts don't transition to the fediverse, as if they won't bring with them an influx of users (at least a fraction of which would be considered undesirable).
Why do you want them to come here? (As someone who would like to see Lemmy grow, I'm curious about how you think this will rollout and what the consequences will be). I would like to see Lemmy grow but I'm not sure all of that growth will have solely good follow-on effects.
Because the Fediverse is a mess with atrocious UX. Choose the wrong server and you might find you are cut off from a large chunk of it because a mastodon.art mod didn’t like something that happened on your instance and servers copy blocklist from each other (not a theoretical example, mind you, something I learned a few months into being on one particular instance.).
Servers can have all sorts of rules you will have to carefully study or risk getting banned (some for example will only allow images with descriptions being shared, this includes boosts.)
In short, the amount of work expected to participate is just - never - going to draw in the average user.
Its too nerdy for its own good. The plebs want simple. Its the way of things.
Presumably either because they've not heard of the Fediverse, because almost nobody has, and/or because they want people to actually see what they post.
Probably because it has an algorithm
tech and age, need for investment.
It doesn’t though.
B/c people are indoctrinated under capitalism to need some kinda daddy.
The thing is, bluesky is just old twitter, it will become X eventually...Bluesky sucks, but jessus, mastodon sucks in terms of usability. Its only for technical people and experience on mastodon is fatal compared to bluesky, sad that mastodon won't take over, as it could...at least bluesky is not bad YET.
Bluesky is more popular because it has VC money behind it.
There's no excuse for using Xittter in 2025.
Why switch to BlueSky if you have Mastodon...
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:
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.
It does have keyword blocking.
Not sure what nuclear block means but I can't think of any way a blocked person could be seen again. It even has above nuclear blocking where you block their entire server.
It has custom feeds but the implementation with lists is very fiddly and I wish it would be improved.
There is a trending posts section but I think you want a personalised discover feed? Which will never happen of course.
In a word, audience. I'd prefer it if everyone went with Mastodon, but the audience on BlueSky is orders of magnitude bigger. I cross post to both, but only because I don't trust BlueSky not to do exactly what Twitter and Meta have done eventually.
They might do the Twitter. Jack Dorsey has already left the board saying exactly that.
Cause the name is hard to remember.. I was trying to yesterday and the closest I could get is megatron and megalodon
The name should have been MinBB (Mastadon is not Blue Bird).
I tried masterdon, mostertant (I don’t know what that one is) and eventually needed to look up the name from an E-Mail…
Guess why? /s For real, people, some of you live in a bubble...
I think there's a fairly serious problem for large accounts on mastodon but I will never have one so I can't quite understand it myself.
Something like dealing with replies / scolds without spending all day blocking is too hard. It doesn't help that "no algorithm" means "show first reply at the top" so quick replies can dominate comments.
The bit I don't understand is why this is fine on blue sky. Is it just different users? I can't quite believe that but I can't see why blue sky would be less annoying.
These who waited until the X take over to move away are simply following trends.
How many times can people keep making the same mistake without us concluding they're stupid? Closed corporate social networks ALWAYS go to shit. Enshitification is inevitable. And you'll have the sunk cost fallacy stopping them from leaving, until they all finally get fed up and switch again. Own your network - stop swapping.
But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don't need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn't (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer
But we did leave...
...about a decade too late.
But we did leave
Who is we?
From what I can find Twitter has around 500 million users monthly, meanwhile Bluesky has less than 30 million total users... I've seen public figures who are outspoken against Trump and Musk, some who even called them Nazis, still using twitter but not Bluesky or Mastodon. And I even see people on Lemmy post screenshots from Twiiter posts.
So, clearly, the vast majority of people have not left, and those who did are just going for another centralized platform that is likely to suffer from the same problems as Twitter in the future. And all this about a decade too late, as another user said.
Scientists should consult tech people about stuff like this just like we should consult scientists for science stuff. Unfortunately a lot of tech people also aren't conscious of this stuff either.
They gotta get their news out to the masses, at least they choose something besides twitter.
Cool. I'm going out on a limb and saying Bluesky seems pretty based so far. I made an account when it was announced, and it's pretty cool. Nice app, seemingly good mission statement.
I don't want to dismiss something until it actually turns to shit. If it's good now, I'll use it now. When it turns to crap, I'll just jump off. I'll always have Lemmy and Mastodon as my mains, so I don't see the harm personally. 🤷♂️ Let's just hope it'll last for the scientists' sake.
Problem is it absolutely will turn when the Bluesky owners Jay Graber and Jack Dorsey decide it's time to cash in. The project started out as a way to start decentralizing twitter, but they never actually accomplished that goal.
Jack Dorsey never had ownership (just directed an investment) and left the board (didn't agree with moderation, lol)
Jay also isn't majority owner.
It's a public benefit corporation too so they don't have a profit requirement.
The harder parts with decentralizing content-addressed systems like it is scaling open spaces (like how a microblog is technically one big shared space). You need big caches and big indexes. They're working actively on making it easier for others to run those app servers. There's already a few independent projects building them. Federating account hosting and feed generation and moderation services are all live already
Why is it a problem? If a tool is good now, I'll use it now.
I don't stop myself from buying a new axe just because it'll break eventually, you know what I mean?
Although obviously if there was an axe that never would break, I'd buy that! But maybe there are trade-offs. Maybe the never-breaking axe has a complicated handle or something. I don't know, I'm trying my best with the axe analogy to describe Bluesky vs Mastodon. 😅 Hopefully it's clear enough!
First time seeing HTTP code 451
because I needed an explanation of what that means, and I wanted it to be cute and funny.
"Sorry, it's literally impossible for us not to sell your data!"
When I first got a Bluesky account, back when it was invite-only a whole bunch of the Physicists and Astronomers I used to follow on Twitter were already there. If anything it seemed like scientists were early adopters.
oof. blue sky was created by the guy who made twitter wasn't it? if he sells to the next bond villain, blue sky will just become twitter 2.0.
open source, decentralized.
i have accepted that most of the internet will be a vicious cycle of enshittification. go to cool new site, site gets too popular for its own good, monetization kicks in, site now sucks, rinse and repeat.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
FOSS stuff like lemmy and mastodon will never get past the first step, which is fine. they will just occupy a separate niche.
I wouldn't say never, but fedverse projects will need to find ways to smooth off the rough edges. Also the more enshittifcation happens the more I think people will be willing and able to get past the rough edges. If any one of the services breaks through and becomes mainstream, it'll provide a roadmap to success for other services and people will be more comfortable with the concepts.
FOSS is the final destination after people get sick of capitalism ruining every other app/site.
People usually don't go back to shitty products unless they have no choice. Linux users don't go back to Windows. I'll never use an Adobe product again. Etc.
Look at Linux's popularity over the years decades. I've used it since I was 10 years old twenty years ago. It is absolutely climbing. FOSS hasn't even peaked yet lol
Yes but it's also a good sign that he left the project some time ago. He's all about NOSTR now.
I would prefer any ActivityPub instance, but press media (and in general private entities), to which scientific institutes intend diffusion, is moving to bluesky...
I have no clue on the reasons people like Bluesky (or threads). None at all.
Bluesky has a lot more normies on it while mastodon is mostly early-adopter types. Mastodon, in my experience, is either very technical people (software engineers and other tech people) or very political people. Bluesky has normal people on it
I checked out threads for a day and I liked it because the algorithm wasn't jamming a bunch of outrage content down my throat but that's the only thing I can say about it. Haven't used it since then (deleted my entire meta account)
At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation, so they at least have to consider the public good in their decision-making and not just profit. May not be much, but it's a start.
How is that regulated?
May not be much, but it’s a start.
Actually, when you tell people something is a start but it is actually a false start that doesn't deliver on the fundamental promises at all, it is much worse than having a much slower start....
At least Bluesky is a public benefit corporation
🤡 🤡 🤡 🪴 🐶 👶 🤡
^ people that think that actually matters in 2025
from one monoplatform to another? OK cool, what could go wrong?
Now all governments around the globe and other public services and we.are getting somewhere.
See you can be a really good scientist and not smart at the same time. Move to mastodon.
Neat, I have an account on there already.
Proof that people rarely know much about anything outside of their field. They'll just be playing this song and dance again when the Bluesky owner cashes in.
If/when that happens, its still better than giving twitter any traffic.
There is at least some (admittedly subpar) federation possible. So if the need is great enough, someone may take up the challenge.
From what I understand, Bsky didn't actually provide much (if any) OSS code to create the federated apps, just the protocol. So there would need to be tons of work done to create it. Some people were (rightly) pointing out that time might be better spent improving existing solutions like Mastodon, rather than freely providing more value to a for-profit company.
All these people - they don't learn.
For microblogs NOSTR is already better than everything else, right now. Provided you don't care much about keeping the same identity over years, cause an identity is a pubkey there, used directly (no temporary identities signed by it or something), so with more popularity those will be lost again and again.
I don't use microblogs, just it seems to have that functionality functioning perfectly and in distributed fashion.
If you don't like cryptobros there (less and less dominant over time btw), then BlueSky might raise even bigger suspicions.