I'm not sure what to do about Twitter. I don't post very much at all but I use it for finding out about papers on radiology imaging and paleontology. Neither of these communities have moved to Mastodon or other social media sites.
A few days ago there was a very interesting discussion started by Tom Holtz (a tyrannosaur expert) about a new paper claiming to estimate the number of neurons in adult dinosaurs. There were a few interesting threads critiquing the paper. Where else could I encounter this conversation? I'm also a passive member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology - but they don't have a forum where this sort of talk happens. There used to be a dinosaur email list - I think it was a digest of the dinosaur usenet group. No idea if this exists in any form right now. Most of the interactive medical informatics discussions that I'm in use Slack. These include standards organizations and open source projects. I might try to experiment discussing some open source software medical imaging on Mastodon - but it doesn't seem to be gathering momentum in that community either. Maybe Slack will be best here because that's where everyone is and my goal is to standardize the representation of ML output in radiology images. And for politics - maybe social media is just too easily manipulated to be a foundation for any social movement. There are so many ways that algorithms and corporations can filter information - I don't see how one can trust these institutions/corporations. Without a reasonable way to establish trust (and over time revoke it) it's too fragile/dangerous a tool. Years ago I read a book by Leopold Kohr that proposed decentralizing political structures in the world; after making many reasonable arguments about the need to construct social networks on a smaller scale there was a chapter about how possible this dream was. My memory is that the chapter contained the single word 'No". Maybe the technology that works well for some small organized communities for communication just will fail for general social interactions no matter if the group is controlled by a corporation or as some public utility when the group gets above a certain size. On Sun, Jan 8, 2023 at 6:00 PM Suresh Ramasubramanian via Silklist < [email protected]> wrote: > Mastodon is at 2000s levels when it comes to abuse mitigation and, for > more than one instance, SRE practices. Watching this is like watching > evolution in real time of stuff I and others have seen and evolved over > two decades or more. > > --srs > ------------------------------ > *From:* Silklist <[email protected]> > on behalf of José María Mateos via Silklist <[email protected]> > *Sent:* Monday, January 9, 2023 4:12:18 AM > *To:* [email protected] <[email protected]> > *Cc:* José María Mateos <[email protected]> > *Subject:* Re: [Silk] Back to actual *social* media > > On Sun, Jan 08, 2023 at 04:21:11PM +0000, Suresh Ramasubramanian via > Silklist wrote: > >I’m getting déjà vu to several such discussions from the 2000s. And > >mastodon as well is one of those things that takes me way back to when > >we were all young and naive > > I left Twitter in 2016 after having been thinking about it for a couple > of years (the time I needed to invest in that cesspool to obtain a > meaningful return had increased beyond what I considered reasonable) and > I joined Mastodon mid-November after I saw some movement there from > people in my close circles. I must say it has very "2008 Twitter" vibes: > it's fun, it's interesting, there are mainly meaningful discussions and > there are few trolls (yet.) It's a matter of time they'll eventually > arrive, but I want the optimist in me wants to think we've learned a bit > about blocking and silencing. I know we haven't. > > I specially like that I support my instance financially via a monthly > contribution. I know the admin personally. It helps making me feel I'm > at home; everything has a human scale. > > Cheers! > > P.S.: about mailing lists. I'm starting a small project (pushing for law > reform --ID theft protections are horrible-- here in Canada) that will > eventually ask for volunteers when it's open to the public and I plan to > have a mailing list as the main communication tool + a small wiki > installed on a shared host as the main documentation repository. No big > tech anywhere to be seen, and I'll push hard to keep it that way; let's > see how that goes. > > P. P. S.: I don't write much, but thanks a lot to Udhay for finding a > new home for the list. > > -- > José María (Chema) Mateos || https://rinzewind.org > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist > -- > Silklist mailing list > [email protected] > https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist >
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