>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.
If the poll was done _properly_, that sample size is _fine_; there’ll be a decent margin of error, but not as much as you might expect. 1k people is a fairly standard size for polls, with even very high quality ones rarely doing over a few thousand.
The real consideration was whether the poll was done properly.
The 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.
Among 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.
There'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".
> * 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).
On 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.
X 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.
It'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.
Back 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.
It 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.
I 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.
I 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.
i just went on, searched bsky for variants of ai/llm/generative, and literally did not see one positive post after scrolling for several minutes (beyond some boring generative art slop, which isn't really "positive" imo).
it seems just the same sycophancy, but in the opposite way twitter is.
maybe my searches were poor so i'm curious what you see that is in any way "positive"; even given your example, searching for ai + cancer is just thousands of posts with some variant of "ai is a cancer."
it's so single note that it's no wonder that growth for bluesky has plummeted. it's just boring.
There'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.
I don't have that experience. But perhaps I am far less forgiving of the christofacist community on twitter that seeps through EVEN though I follow not one of them and none follow me. It's easier to read past the artsy crowd for me at least even if I don't agree. But AI hostile? Guess it depends if you don't post AI 'artwork' all day but just interesting things you are doing then I have not seen anyone complain.
The replies are what make it hardest to remain on xitter. You’ll tap into some totally innocuous post and randomly get hit with a reply that’s nasty by even shady imageboard standards.
Can'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.
so deeply controversial when a guy doing nazi salutes in front of crowds and illegally dismantling key pillars of US foreign policy finds himself unfavored by the media
X 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.
> 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.
Yeah just reading comments on Arstechnica articles like this one you can see the same baying mob they have on Bluesky.
Elon bad. X nazi.
Meanwhile I closed my Bluesky account because every other post is calling for violence against political opponents, gleeful over assassination and unrest and the recent beating of a doge employee.
It'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.
You'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)
Readit News
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
The real consideration was whether the poll was done properly.
* 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.
* 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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
it seems just the same sycophancy, but in the opposite way twitter is.
maybe my searches were poor so i'm curious what you see that is in any way "positive"; even given your example, searching for ai + cancer is just thousands of posts with some variant of "ai is a cancer."
it's so single note that it's no wonder that growth for bluesky has plummeted. it's just boring.
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.
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.
The data's longevity was probably helped by being a potent source of hate to power Musk's AI
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.
(it was not always this way though)
> 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
Scientists No Longer Find X Professionally Useful, and Have Switched to Bluesky
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44978815
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.
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.