i ask because Bonfire is a free libre open source project proposing a federated social media approachqand it seems cool… but i can’t join the pilot program since i’m not in a school or such organization.
Idk what’s already in use though so this is a joint shoutout and a question. Like, what way do you use to chat about nerdy stuff rn? Does this Bonfire.social project fill a niche you’re missing alot in?
You’ll find most scientists hanging out on the platform formally known as Twitter, Bluesky, and (to a lesser degree) Mastodon. This may be disappointing to hear, but most scientists are just normal people who don’t really care about federation and open source software and stuff. They just want to post stuff and have it be seen.
Some of us do care! Just not enough to get a critical mass away from the proprietary networks.
When I was doing science I mostly used email & conferences
okay
The science community used to be very active on Twitter. Now a significant portion of it has migrated to BlueSky. I’m an ecologist, but I don’t use social media much personally, and not at all professionally. I have a Mastodon server, and I still think that platform has a lot going for it.
That’s overkill for my needs.
Forums were the main thing everyone used 10+ years ago. Then Facebook & Reddit started to steal people away. But now that those big companies have shown how dangerous they are, I’ve tried to go back to forums as much as possible.
I use Lemmy too, but the lemmy software is still early in development compared to forum software. So I started up a forum instead of a Lemmy instance: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/
Are there any benefits to using Bonfire over simply Mastodon/Misskey?
Open Science Network, though, is promising, but I don’t understand why the same group develops OSN and Bonfire. Am I missing something?
Mathoverflow is still quite active though it’s just math. Other than that, there are some good personal blogs and the like. Mathstodon.xyz is a math focused Mastodon instance if that helps. Bonfire doesn’t sound interesting at the moment but maybe it will become so. I’m pretty down on the whole concept of social media though. I’m here out of habit.
Lemmy.
ResearchGate mostly.
“sciency people” is a huge community, I think even within computer science (which is not a science), each community have their own perferred platform.
Algorithm, foundation, and automata theory people often don’t have social media or on mailing lists; more foundational fields like programming language people often perfer Mastodon; more flushy system, network, and security people often are on bluesky; AI/ML people, of course, are often found on xitter.
lol
It looks like you can host your own instance from the link that you posted, so you don’t need a school or external organization. It might be worth trying.
Otherwise I feel like stackexchange and stackoverflow have been useful to me, although it’s not quite chatting.
