Thread by @BretDevereaux

A number of folks are bringing up Mastadon and while it is certainly early days yet, I don't think its structure works here.

One advantage to Twitter for early career scholars is that it makes the boundaries between groups porous and ill-defined. 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1588926178924322817

Take me, for example. Am I part of #ClassicsTwitter? Or #twitterstorians ? Am I a part of security-policy-twitter? Look at my follows, I'm certainly 'miltwitter adjacent.' What about medieval twitter? Or fantasy twitter?

Or more to the point, *journalist* twitter? 2/

That last one may seem superfluous, but the folks that opened doors for me to write in major publications wouldn't *be* on a Classics-oriented Mastadon server, because they're either modern historians or journalists. 3/

And while *right*now* a lot of Mastadon is new and in flux, if the social dynamics look like any discord I've ever seen, you're going to end up with an emergent hierarchy with a LOT more lock-in and local dominance than is possible even for 'big accounts' here. 4/

So the 'undivided, undifferentiated public forum' is a substantial advantage to Twitter's structure if you're looking to create a unique niche for some kind of intellectual product.

Also, big accounts are good, not bad: they're a discovery mechanism. /end