Because too many good people are doing nothing.

Are you trying to say that authoritarianism is a component of fascism, but fascism isn’t the only type of authoritarianism? 'Cause that’s not super clear from your wording.

Because scientists are normal people, and probably a higher proportion of them than normal are tech nerds.

People don’t have only one interest. The board members of fediscience.org are biosystems scientists and forensic linguists.

Would be kinda cool to have some more African and south+east Asian instances. I would happily donate to help get some instances hosted in poorer countries.

That last one I heard from a psych. They also said: if you’re in bed and you can’t sleep, get up. Go back to bed only when you feel tired again. That way you train your brain that bed=sleep.

Right, but why would a scientist set up a mastodon server within their work place? If I were to do it (and I did set up a diaspora instance back in the day), it would be off my own bat, not on work machines.

If I wanted my workplace to do it, that would be a different story, and I’d argue for it to be done by the IT team…

My question was about the “scientists are not allowed to” part. I’ve never heard to such restrictions, and been in the field for more than a decade.

What… Are you taking about? I know hundreds of scientists and the vast majority of them interact with social media just as much as normal people.

Doom scrolling is facilitated by ad-optimised algorithms that push low-nuance, emotive content that gets a reaction, for views. (Thinking particularly of twitter and Facebook here)

The fediverse doesn’t have that, and has no reason to, because as soon as any provider starts pushing ads, people will switch servers. So I think it WILL stay that way.

Also, I think as a consequence of having less combatitive content up front, people are generally in a less heightened emotional state as a baseline, and are able to approach more nuanced content more thoughtfully.