Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges
www.france24.com
Scientists suffering insults and mass-spam are abandoning Twitter for alternative social networks as hostile climate-change denialism surges on the platform following Elon Musk's takeover.

EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.

Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.

While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      There are 3 issues with this:

      1. This is a third-party project, not an official part of Bluesky. Bluesky was never meant to work with ActivityPub, that was a clear design choice. This is just a workaround.
      2. It’s opt-in, meaning most accounts will never get federated, because people just aren’t aware that something like this exists. This especially applies to new users.
      3. It relies on a centralized service, Bluesky and ActivityPub servers don’t talk directly to each other, which would be required for true federation. Federation is always decentralized, this is the exact opposite.

      I don’t understand why anyone should use Bluesky with cheap hacks to attempt to fix Bluesky’s poor design choices and or utter incompetence, if they could just use Mastodon and federate with the Fediverse over ActivityPub by default.

      From a user perspective, Bluesky is just Mastodon with a recommendation algorithm. There is no other protocol required for this, everything could easily be done using ActivityPub exclusively. I will never care about Bluesky, since it tries to be the new Twitter, but the enshittification of Twitter began when they introduced their crappy algorithm, instead of just displaying tweets of accounts you follow in chronological order (like Mastodon does it).