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This is a recreation of a Twitter thread of my response to someone who said re: scientists moving to Mastodon: "Leaving the global community to enter a silo makes no sense."
I think this represents a common misconception about Mastodon! The entire point of federated social media is that it isn't a silo. On Twitter you are in a Twitter silo. On a Mastodon instance you can interact with anyone on ANY instance.
[thread continues :) ]
Right now Mastodon *feels* like a silo because there aren't many people there - so yep, it isn't a global community. But neither was Twitter at the beginning. If we can only be on social media where everyone else *already* is, then we'll be held hostage forever.
To be clear, I think the "global community" part is really important for scientists, which is why I'm not leaving Twitter right now. But I would very much like to be *able* to.
[thread: 2/3]
I 100% agree that scientists not silo-ing themselves is important. But in theory that's an argument FOR federated social media. Like right now people on Facebook are not seeing my Tweets and maybe they should. :)
I'm not leaving Twitter... yet. But at this point there's a non-zero chance that it becomes unusable in the near future. :-\ So as a scientist who wants to communicate with people I want other options.
[thread: 3/3]
@cfiesler I really love the counterpoint of reach to the idea of that leaving is silo-ing. In FB I do not control my feed. In Twitter... to some degree. In IG no idea and it is crowded with promotions. So that would support the idea of federation not oppose it.
But the challenge is how not to increase the cost of doing this outreach if we spread across too many spaces. I feel this cannot be really though in an "individual scientist" level, but a community one.