The crisis on Twitter caused by Elon Musk’s erratic management raises concerns about the future of science communication as interest in open protocols grows
The reputation crisis created on Twitter by Elon Musk’s erratic management, and the ensuing flight from users and advertisers, has raised concerns about the future of science communication on social networks.
Professor Ignacio López-Goñi has already asked questions about Twitter and scientific communication here. Along the same lines, Pablo Otero Tranchero, from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, has reflected on what science loses if it loses Twitter.
Leaving aside the option of Mastodon as an alternative or plan B, Twitter’s uncertain evolution is leading to a profound rethinking of how both networking between scientific communities and dissemination of results have been managed to date.
Fortunately, the richness and diversity of the digital ecosystem far exceeds Twitter. Since Tim Berners-Lee released the software for the World Wide Web in 1991, the channels for sharing knowledge, expression, information, opinion, complaints and criticism have only grown and multiplied.
One of the most important consequences of the Twitter crisis is that it has given its users the opportunity to assess how they use the Internet and discover that since the commercial appropriation of the Web and the proliferation of application markets, a large part of the day-to-day practice in the network is carried out under the orbit of large technological platforms that are managed with proprietary software.
Researcher Mark Carrigan wonders on the blog of the London School of Economics (LSE) whether it’s not time to rethink the academic use of Twitter and other commercial platforms.
The good reception of Mastodon by the scientific communities allows us to glimpse a future for academic networks and the dissemination of science, which will be more about protocols (open versus closed) than platforms (free versus proprietary). ).
A few years before this crisis, Mike Masnick, editor of the Techdirt blog, had stated almost in manifesto code that protocols, not platforms, were the right technology approach to protect free speech and escape the economic and digital infrastructure. tech companies.
After what Professor Carlos Scolari has called the War of Platforms, it seems that now comes the War of Protocols.
The emergence of Mastodon has demonstrated the potential of the open ActivityPub protocol for decentralized social media management. But there are other protocols that also want to play a major role in this revolution, such as the Matrix project or the AT protocol, promoted by Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) under the Bluesky brand, which proposes to improve the user experience of social networks decentralize them, giving them back control over the management of your personal data.
At the same time, Dorsey offers up to $1 million a year to fund open protocol Internet projects.
Of the competing protocols, special attention should be paid to the nascent Nostr project, which promises to overcome the limitations of Twitter and Mastodon to create a censorship-resistant social network that exposes the identities of the users of the servers’ domain names in a federated network.
In this process moving from platforms to protocols, it is foreseeable that scientists’ concerns will accelerate transitions that will be slow and costly for universities.
As the expert Andy Tattersall points out, “Academics can easily get out of the Twitter square, but for their institutions it will be much more difficult.”
Clearly, the social capital built on Twitter around personal and business brands cannot be wasted. But it’s also clear that personal and business brands are being humbled in an environment mired in chaos and whose future model remains a great unknown.
In this scenario, having a plan B is reasonable. But this decision should not ignore the lessons learned about the internet model that the commercial platforms have built and the lessons that the shift to open protocols to manage our presence and work on the internet leaves in the scientific community.
This article was published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
