Right, thanks. Still a super useful system, IMO, though I’m sure better versions are possible.

That’s true, but it’s gotta be balanced by limiting the fallout of extreme cases on other users

It doesn’t accumulate and display anywhere though, does it?

Maybe. They might also mean you’re an idiot.

Slashdot used to have a multidimensional voting system that would allow you to up or down vote something based on whether it was funny/insightful/correct, etc (can’t remember the dimension). I wish we had something like that. Sometimes it would be useful to mark a comment as “funny, but also wrong”

There ate multiple algorithms, but I don’t think any of them account for both votes and comments… I might be wrong though.

Tangent: the "scaled* algorithm, which normalises post ranks by the popularity of the community they’re posted to, is excellent. I recommend everyone use it as their default.

Most by number of users, I’d guess.

I’m on mastodon.social, and basically never see threads posts.

I suspect the distributed moderation will help in the long run too.

Most of the core mastodon servers haven’t blocked threads…

1. Disruption: Probably ethics? I mean, I know big global businesses barely have any, but they do care about their reputation somewhat. Anyone running a botnet to destroy small/medium fediverse servers would be discovered fairly quickly, I suspect. Nothing is going to stop AI training scraping outside of regulation, I suspect.

2. Ads are enshittification. Federation is defense against it, because it prevents vendor lock-in and allows migration while maintaining your network effect. Threads already tried to join, and nearly nothing of theirs gets through. I’m on a mainstream mastodon service that doesn’t block threads, and I’ve seen a threads post only once or twice. Threads can’t display their add on my service, so there’s no incentive for them to push content.

Oh, hah. I double checked the whole post, but forgot to look in the obvious spot 😅

What services? Mastodon? Lemmy? Anything federated?

Because scientists are normal people, and probably a higher proportion of them than normal are tech nerds.

People don’t have only one interest. The board members of fediscience.org are biosystems scientists and forensic linguists.

Would be kinda cool to have some more African and south+east Asian instances. I would happily donate to help get some instances hosted in poorer countries.

Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.

If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…

The whole point of federation is that that can’t really happen, or at least they can fuck a single server, but not the whole ecosystem.

My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.

It’s a problem for the same reason twitter dying sucks… The network effect is important, and maintaining yours during a slow, piecemeal mass migration is hard. Which is why I’m sticking with mastodon now, despite more of my relevant network being on BS.

It’s important because, along with the ability to migrate accounts, it prevents/deters enshittification. In betting Bluesky will hit that wall in the next few years (I’m guessing they’ll never properly implement federation).

It’s not that it’s less annoying, it’s that it was in the right place at the right time to capture sufficient network effect…

What… Are you taking about? I know hundreds of scientists and the vast majority of them interact with social media just as much as normal people.