94 The great scientific Mastodon migration

Over the past few weeks scientists have been swapping Twitter for Mastodon. Our very own Nabil-Fareed Alikhan talks about his experience with setting up and running a Mastodon server called https://mstdn.science which is one of the places where scientists have moved over to. We are joined by Emma Hodcroft to get an independent scientists view on the whole thing. In the MicroBinfie podcast, Andrew and Nabil discuss the migration of academics from Twitter to a new platform called Mastodon, with Nabil playing a significant role in this shift. According to Nabil, Mastodon is a free and open web application designed for micro-blogging. It enables integration and communication between servers, allowing the users to follow, reply, or read content from other servers. The migration happened after Elon Musk bought Twitter and made significant changes that concerned people about freedom of speech and democracy. In response, Nabil and Duncan set up their own Mastodon instance called https://mstdn.science initially planning to create a social network for bioinformaticians, microbial genomics people, and tech-savvy microbiologists. Expected to have only 50-100 users, many more scientists, including Nobel Laureates, journals, and scientists from other disciplines, joined, and Nabil's instance now has almost 2000 users. Meanwhile, other instances around science, like genomic.social or ecoevo.social, also saw a surge in sign-ups. In terms of resources, Nabil and Duncan's virtual server have almost 2000 users costing around £100 per 1000 users, depending on how much interaction and following goes on. The Mastodon network replicates content from other instances, spawning many jobs, even if a user's account doesn't change much. Nabil does not limit which instances of Mastodon communicate with his site but does block domains serving unwanted or unsafe content. Even though the Mastodon network can crash and burn, Nabil thinks it could still work in the long run. The podcast contributors suggest that Twitter's recent changes have left some users feeling dissatisfied, leading them to Mastodon, which is a decentralized social media platform. Some dodgy servers have been blocked by Mastodon for moderation, and people have moved from Twitter to Mastodon as a total replacement for Twitter. Mastodon has become a "sign" for fed-up users. According to Emma, who recently moved from Twitter to Mastodon, Mastodon is a hedge against Twitter's unknown future. Mastodon's decentralized platform allows for a shift of power towards content and interaction, not available in a centrally controlled platform. Mastodon may not replace Twitter as a one-for-one replacement, but it fits certain use cases, such as a place for academics to complain about papers. Mastodon's success is not dependent on Twitter's fate but rather on what "crazy ideas" Twitter comes up with in the future, Emma argues. While Mastodon may never be quite the same as Twitter, it could be even better.