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.
> NOSTR and Mastodon should never be left out of any serious research
I'm a nerd and I've never heard of NOSTR. What I've heard about Mastodon suggests strong "Desktop Linux circa 2000" vibes: Too much fiddling around for too little gain. If I can't be bothered to deal with either of these, the normies certainly cannot.
Most nerds I know wouldn't see obstacles to try out either Mastodon nor NOSTR because they'd be naturally curious about them.
Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.
Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.
In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.
No idea where you get your gossip, the only real problem I'm aware of with Mastodon is search functionality being useless garbage. Not even sure what you would "fiddle" with on a social platform? Or are you talking about self hosting?
I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
Agreed that better filtering would help greatly in making Bluesky more work-safe. (By contrast, ActivityPub’s communities do a decent job self-filtering, but that community is also more self-selecting at present.)
That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
Since I started reporting them ad "Unwanted sexual content" I am seeing significantly less half naked persons desperately begging for sttention. But there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art. Bluesky needs to correctly identify and relabel those as comics and manga.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
> there's still the issue of all the comic and manga crap labeled as art
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
Labeling content as SFW/NSFW is the first step towards censorship. Seeing a butt never hurt anyone, and we shouldn't try to sanitize the Internet just to make it safe for children.
This is how things would (and ought to) work without a social media algorithm pushing engagement. It's a better way.
It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.
Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.
Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
> Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
it comes down to who you follow, posts you comment on, and the type of posts you like. those who say it's filled with (insert some category) indicates that their past activities likely involved those entities or topics in some form.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
You choose who to follow on twitter. It's also your choice to use the AI feed vs just who you follow.
Mechahitler thing was a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
That’s what I’ve heard from basically everyone I know personally. They get the app sign up and just a flood of furry content. Bluesky really needs to figure out a better default curated feed if they’re gonna just recommend content like that.
> Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
On other platforms I tend to not use algorithmic feeds that much, and so I don't encounter that problem. That's because I already know some good accounts.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
> I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.
What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?
To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.
I joined to try to re-follow the tech community that was lost when Elon lost it. All I get now is 24/7 non stop Trump complaints. I get it, but it adds no value to my life. I certainly don't look forward to opening the app and hearing them. I've tried blocking the terms and even unfollowing people, but to no avail. Now I just never use the app.
I tried registering a new account using my real name a few weeks ago (I have never used blue sky before this) and within 5 minutes got an email saying my account is suspended for spam behaviour that violates community guidelines. I hadn’t even posted anything with the account yet.
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
Several comments already angrily agreeing with the claim in the headline, which is weird.
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
the bubble already exists, or.....tower, it's called academia.What is quite clear from many personal experiences in online semi professional forums, is that what many top notch acedemics crave is to "profess" to an interested random group in the hopes of finding successors and students, or colaborators that are missing from there actual real world life. This is proving to be clumsy and time consuming, with no good way to moderate, and distinguish between those who's enthusiasims are positive and the always almost's.
This whole phenominon is ancient, and we have accounts of identical situations from the agora of
athens and many other citys open .....forums
the open forumis messy, but it inevitably yields new thoughts and actions bieng adopted, vs a closed school, that yield orthodox reactionary beurocratic stagnancy.
The mainline bluesky "mushroom" PDS have been struggling with an influx of spam and bot accounts so they've gotten a bit picky on email addresses (which I partially get but also find quite frustrating).
Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network.
I regularly block throwaway email providers from PortableApps.com as that's where most of the genuinely awful community members come from. Racists screeds, death threats, and porn, oh my. The spammers, on the other hand, almost all use Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo.
The are fewer posters and likes on bluesky today than there were in early September of last year, and both graphs have been trending down consistently since February of this year.
Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today.
Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
I'm trying to like Bluesky. X has a large tech community and some deep thoughts/discussions on tech and philosophy matters, but I can't find similar people or groups on Bluesky yet.
On both Twitter and Bluesky, my best results at feed building have come from finding one person I find valuable, then looking at and following people they interact with and follow. A brief look at bios and recent posts helps. Then repeating this for additional interesting people.
I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
It really depends what you are looking for. Try searching for some starter packs to seed your follow graph. The below site works well but the search is a bit dumb/literal and the packs are all user created so you'll want to check some of the accounts in the packs that come up before you blindly follow them.
I find it really difficult to care about whether other people use a website or not. I stopped using it at one point, and I started using another website instead. I really don't care if other people continue to use it because I can just continue on with my life ignoring it.
I spent numerous times a day crafting paragraphs desperately trying to convince others that I didn't care. The faster I can realize the feeling's probably mutual, the faster I hit that back button and find the next thing to not care about.
That's a 12 week window though. Foolish to use that as a long-term viability measure. I'd be willing to wager usage could come up again as the U.S. midterms ramp up in 2026.
Readit News
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.
I'm a nerd and I've never heard of NOSTR. What I've heard about Mastodon suggests strong "Desktop Linux circa 2000" vibes: Too much fiddling around for too little gain. If I can't be bothered to deal with either of these, the normies certainly cannot.
Mastodon works as intended and grows reasonably well. NOSTR is quite frankly one of the most relevant innovations on open source forum/communities from the past two decades.
Both serve similar purposes (build online communities) but the while Mastodon uses a traditional server with a federation on top, NOSTR uses the concept of relay.
In essence, your texts never belong to the owner of a server, you send them to any of a thousand volunteer maintained relays and your audience reads them from there. Your identity remains the same, anyone can verify the authenticity of your texts and this is quite a feature on a time that digital censorship increases.
But its published by Oxford, so it must be perfect.
/s
Dead Comment
Telling Bluesky that I'm not interested in "this type of content" didn't help remove the problem. Blocking/Reporting the accounts is futile, as they are so numerous. Moderation lists for LGBT/furry content seem to be nonexistent or unlisted from public modlist sites (maybe they are considered to be "homophobic"?)
Anyway, Bluesky does't seem to be safe-for-work, so it's hardly a proper replacement for Twitter. If this is fixed, then that would be good.
That said: furries are the internet’s coal mine canary. They’re one of the more visually prominent marginalized internet communities, and one of the first to get deplatformed when capital steps in. If you’re on a platform where furries are thriving, you’re probably in a safe space. Cf. the history of Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, etc.
Would be nice if others would report them too, because there are kids on BlueSky and they don't need to see their uncles/aunts or neighbors sticking their butt into a camera.
I'm not into comics or manga, but surely they're art?
And I mean this quite aside from the annoyance of seeing them when you don't want to. I'm not saying you should have to see them. It just doesn't seem right to imply that you shouldn't have to see them because they're not art.
But of course this is a slow way to grow my network. But I like the slow linearity of the timeline this way.
It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.
Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.
Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
Is twitter SFW? I constantly hear about "mechahitler" and all sorts of terrible bigotry, language, and dog whistles. I may be ignorant because I refuse to even go on there.
my feed is made up of rust stuff, databases, system designs, tech meetups, a few founders, OSS stuff, and some companies. even the other day, i came across a post from a dev at planetscale, ben dickens, who said he's going to livestream at a scheduled time to talk about some of the database concepts he recently read in the book DDIA. i watched it, and it was fantastic.
bottom line, i would say what everyone has to say about X, based on their personal experience, are all completely correct, because it becomes (or can become) the environment you want it to be.
I'd rate twitter about as safe-for-work as 4chan.
Mechahitler thing was a brief controversy that was turned off a while ago and the people I follow aren't getting spammed dumb questions to grok (although I find grok to be very good these days).
The attention seeking right wing accounts are annoyingly prevalent but it's entirely possibly to not see their content. Just like on old twitter which was full of radical politics. Curate your follow list.
I'm not a Bluesky user. Twitter has exactly the same problem. I've got the NSFW setting turned off. And I've reported a lot of accounts posting unflagged NSFW content, mostly videos. And every time I get this slop reply email from them after a few minutes:
Thanks for reporting <account_name> and for using your voice to make X better for everyone. After review, we want to let you know <account_name> hasn't broken our sensitive media rule.
We allow sensitive content — like consensually produced adult content, graphic imagery and violence — in posts as long as it doesn't break our sensitive media policy.
I suspect they let these accounts slide because they value the user (or bot) engagement these accounts generate over safety/moderation.
But on Bluesky, I'm new, and I want to get a feel for what's out there, so the Discover feature has been interesting for that purpose. But using it will quickly lead to the types of content that I mentioned, and I don't think users should have to tolerate this until they find interesting accounts to follow and move on to more controlled feeds.
With that said, from the limited experience I've had with Twitter/X's algorithmic feeds, they haven't been that explicit. But that's my anecdote.
Can't really see a future for Bluesky outside of the niche communities that are already established there.
Dead Comment
What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?
To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.
I appealed but my appeal has seemingly gone into a black hole somewhere.
Dead Comment
Have you considered that it might not be worth it using social media at all?
"Yeah, those academics are all in a bubble together on bsky". Yes, that sounds "professionally useful", to be in a bubble with the people who work in the same field.
bsky.app email support [1] requested me to contact them via blueskyweb.xyz email instead [2], but mail from aliases appears dropped by blueskyweb.xyz.
Gave up creating an account after being given the runaround. In contrast, Mastodon have worked fine for me.
[1]: https://bsky.social/about/support
[2]: https://bsky.social/about/blog/09-18-2024-trust-safety-updat...
Luckily there are alternative PDS that you can use without issue. Tangled[1] (the atproto github host) is one. They are a smaller PDS host so the usual caveats apply (if you act up they are more likely to notice you, downtime may occur, etc) but otherwise you can use them like you would any other PDS to interact with bluesky and the greater atproto network.
1. https://tangled.sh/signup
Bs went from 2.8m likers/day its peak to 1.1m today.
Yes certain so-called scientific fields that have a 100% viewpoint capture in academia only feel comfortable sharing views in the bluesky bubble, and they’re the exclusively-BA schools like “Integrative Biology” that this paper is published in.
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
There was a huge bump of new users right after the election, and things have gone down since then, but they are still much higher than they were in September 2024. And if you look at the tail of the graph, it seems to be holding pretty steady, which is about what you would expect for a social network after a huge spike of growth: not all of those users will stick around.
I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.
Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs
https://blueskyfeeds.com/bluesky-user-growth?t=3m
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats