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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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If you have the time could you expand on the ways academia depends on Twitter? I'm asking genuinely because the 'artist engagement' angle never seemed very convincing to me, but I had never heard of how academia is linked into it.
Twitter was adopted pretty quickly by academics all over the world as a good platform to effortlessly share articles, pre-prints and small results and discussions, as it was much better than Facebook or old Reddit for that. After years being a hub they're now a captive audience.
It's become a good habit for many scientists to include a "check twitter" task on their routine to stay up to date on the goings on of the scientific community. And back when I used it there were lots of cool trends for science communication whose history would be lost on migration, like the #ArachnoThreads listing cool facts about specific spider genera.
Had no idea. Now that you've described it makes a lot of sense, especially because science and academia are always the more active branches of federated social media. Federated social media is almost always trying to imitate the preexisting communities that dominate Twitter, etc. Thanks for the time.