I’ve finally moved my attention from twitter to mathstodon, and it’s really awesome; so much nicer that twitter. In fact, it’s so awesome that I’m thinking that it’s a better instantiation of the localcharts vision than localcharts itself. Having a centralized server is kind of against the localcharts philosophy! I think my ideal vision for the future of localcharts would be to melt into:
A website for hosting personal forests for non-technical users.
Integration between forests and the fediverse.
Then I’ll have my own blog in forest-form, but that will just be “Owen’s blog”; it won’t have any pretensions to centrality in the way that this forum/forester instance does.
The main problem with Mathstodon, or more generally Mastodon, is that not enough people are talking about serious math (or physics, or computer science) there—at least, not that I’ve seen. I’m there, but I have so many more nonmathematical followers than mathematical ones that my posts lean toward general science popularization rather than technical stuff. And now a bunch of cool math and physics people are going to Bluesky, which I refuse to do. So, one key feature of a good discussion ecosystem—lots of good people to talk to—seems to be in short supply on Mastodon.
Interesting, I suppose that even though mastodon supports longer posts than twitter, the UI still encourages rather shallow discussion.
Certainly, LocalCharts in its current form isn’t going anywhere fast! I do think that your criteria against Bluesky holds doubly against LocalCharts though, as LocalCharts is even more centralized
I post on Wordpress and you copy it over on LocalCharts - that doesn’t feel centralized to me.
I think the real problem with Mastodon is not that the UI encourages shorter posts. It’s that people first joining it find it very hard to locate interesting people to talk to, so they become discouraged and give up. A lot of people I know, who started by posting interesting math and physics content, gave up for that reason. And it’s not that they switched to posting shorter, more superficial things. It’s that they completely gave up posting anything!
Examples include Tim Gowers and Eugenia Cheng, but also many less famous folks.
Wow, Mathstodon is awesome! I’ve been thinking in a related vein about Bluesky’s open-source protocol work, which serves as that platform’s backbone (“Authenticated Transfer”, https://atproto.com); it allows federated non-Bluesky applications without Bluesky’s limitations or UX.
