After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, many scientists report the platform is no longer suitable for professional use. A recent survey indicates that researchers are increasingly turning to Bluesky, which they view as more useful, welcoming, and aligned with their goals.
Ikr? However that is not politically expedient hence major pushback exists to even do much as diagnose that issue much less deal with it. Even so, I (successfully) petitioned Discuss.Online to defederate from Hexbear.net, although in that I also asked for this instance to be removed from lemmy.ml as well, but that portion was rejected. Lemmy.ml is STRONGLY anti-Western, so whether its philosophies are correct or wrong (they are wrong imho:-P) either way it is a barrier for specially Western people who check us out and then nope out back to Reddit.
Even after that partial success though I basically gave up that idea since Lemmy does not allow for true blocking of all users on an instance, so nowadays use PieFed (which does offer that ability, as well as SO MANY other additional features) 99% of the time and only occasionally check my old Discuss.Online Lemmy alt. So at this point I’ve lost any hope whatsoever for “Lemmy” to become mainstream, but if there is even a sliver of hope left for that then I am putting it all in on PieFed rather than Lemmy. Perhaps I am wrong but I doubt it.
But it too moves slowly to catch up to being something that mainstream normies will want to use. I am making codeberg requests to try to help it along, even if I cannot contribute code directly. I understand the position of a mainstream person though: we here are fairly (and sometimes even extremely) toxic, especially to newcomers, and all the more so if they are non-techical. It would require much more extensive moderation to kick out people being mean to newcomers, which actually PieFed offers some great tools for that, and yet at the same time a level of traffic that makes coming to the Threadiverse worthwhile. Those two goals seem incompatible though, so realistically I don’t expect it will ever happen. Still we have to try!?
Unfortunately sdf is still federated with Hexbear. The other day I asked a user not to use language dating back to the Roman Empire which has been used as a justification for two thousand years of imperialism, and I got dozens of replies from Hexbear users angry that I asked them to actually behave like leftists, and quite a bit of racism, and a picture of a pig pooping on its testicles. This is a brand new account I made to spread the good word of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ (who was black), so I don’t know how anyone who’s new to the Fediverse is supposed to put up with those people. I guess they just go back to Reddit.