A photograph of a short-eared owl mid-flight was the last Instagram post biology professor Carl Bergstrom shared before announcing his departure from the platform Jan. 10.
I’m just saying, because someone is a scientist absolutely does not absolve them of human fallibility. I just don’t like the take of “because scientist, therefore smart or wise” and that’s not true, they’re just (hopefully) educated and credible in their one specific field and nothing else. I wouldn’t blindly trust a scientist’s choice of social network. It makes no sense. I’d instead trust their education on their specific field.
Right but Mastodon is irritating to use, isn’t it? It has actual problems. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that it doesn’t have problems and therefore anyone not using it is being ignorant.
I’ve been using mastodon for nearly a decade now. The major thing I think is missing from ActivityPub is a decentralized/federated way of doing auth. The ideal for me in ActivityPub is having a profile/DID service provider that you then can attach to services. This would theoretically be like having just a federated identity (or however many identities you want) that you can then go to a lemmy instance or mastodon instance etc and “log in with federated ID” like log in with Google but not dependent on a corporation.
Auth and identity in general is definitely the biggest hurdle with ActivityPub. Right now it’s a bunch of distinct and non-tied profiles, which isn’t necessarily bad, but many people would like an easier way of doing this. Instead of saying “which lemmy do I want to join” it’s just “which identity service do I want?” and then go to and use any mastodon or lemmy or Pixelfed service with that single account. There’s many ways to do this, but it’s definitely possible (in theory, right now there isn’t a spec for this afaik, we just have DIDs and those are very very very young specs.
I’m just saying, because someone is a scientist absolutely does not absolve them of human fallibility. I just don’t like the take of “because scientist, therefore smart or wise” and that’s not true, they’re just (hopefully) educated and credible in their one specific field and nothing else. I wouldn’t blindly trust a scientist’s choice of social network. It makes no sense. I’d instead trust their education on their specific field.
Right but Mastodon is irritating to use, isn’t it? It has actual problems. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend that it doesn’t have problems and therefore anyone not using it is being ignorant.
I’ve been using mastodon for nearly a decade now. The major thing I think is missing from ActivityPub is a decentralized/federated way of doing auth. The ideal for me in ActivityPub is having a profile/DID service provider that you then can attach to services. This would theoretically be like having just a federated identity (or however many identities you want) that you can then go to a lemmy instance or mastodon instance etc and “log in with federated ID” like log in with Google but not dependent on a corporation.
Auth and identity in general is definitely the biggest hurdle with ActivityPub. Right now it’s a bunch of distinct and non-tied profiles, which isn’t necessarily bad, but many people would like an easier way of doing this. Instead of saying “which lemmy do I want to join” it’s just “which identity service do I want?” and then go to and use any mastodon or lemmy or Pixelfed service with that single account. There’s many ways to do this, but it’s definitely possible (in theory, right now there isn’t a spec for this afaik, we just have DIDs and those are very very very young specs.