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1. Embed this notice
   John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:11 JST John Carlos Baez

   @jaztrophysicist - I'm saying that as I become more popular here, I have to be ever more careful not to make the majority of my readers unhappy. "Hardcore math post" means "don't worry if you don't understand this post". (I would like to talk about even more advanced stuff, but there's little audience for that here.)

   • Embed this notice
     julesh (julesh@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:03 JST julesh

     in reply to

     • Martin Escardo

     @MartinEscardo @johncarlosbaez
     Just in case youse didn't know: Zulip-the-software is open source. The category theory Zulip (and several other much smaller servers I'm on) are hosted for free by Zulip-the-company, which is something that could legitimately be taken away at any point. I believe the category theory Zulip is big enough that they would collectively have the ability and resources to self-host if it became necessary. It would probably be similar to running a Mastodon instance

   • Embed this notice
     Martin Escardo (martinescardo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:04 JST Martin Escardo

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez says

     "I'm extremely happy with the Category Theory Community Server."

     Sure. I am also happy with other Zulip servers, and other Discord servers.

     I am just waiting for Zulip and Discord to go the same downfall.

     Actually, one of the Discord servers I am in was formerly a Slack server. But then we were told we would have to pay if we wanted to preserve our posts for more than three months. And then we left.

   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:06 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • Martin Escardo

     @MartinEscardo - I'm not going to Bluesky either, for the same reason as you. Twitter was a lot of fun for me, but when Musk took over I realized that I never again wanted to work for free for a big corporation that could be taken over by a fascist.

     "everybody is disappointed with how things went in all the other (research) social media they were part of since the early 1990's."

     I'm not sure what you mean by that. I'm extremely happy with the Category Theory Community Server, and spend roughly an hour a day discussing math there. But I'm also interested in things that aren't math.

   • Embed this notice
     Martin Escardo (martinescardo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:07 JST Martin Escardo

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez

     Try to get the Bluesky people here. Perhaps by pointing to interesting threads by yourself and by other people.

     I, for myself, am not going to join anything run/funded by billionaires, even if they have genuinely good intentions (in their own wishful inner thoughts).

     So, in particular, there is no way I will join Bluesky. I was vaccinated first as a late joiner to Facebook and then as a very late joiner to Twitter (two years before it became X). I am not in any of them any longer.

     It's not that I am politically against Bluesky. It is simply that I completely lost any motivation to join anything like that.

     And I forgot to mention the defunct Google+ in the above discussion.

     I simply don't want to invest any amount of energy joining anything that will either fail on its own or that else I will like to leave when it becomes "successful".

     We'd better learn how to make things work here.

     And notice that part of the reason things "don't work here" (as you would like) is that everybody is disappointed with how things went in all the other (research) social media they were part of since the early 1990's.

   • Embed this notice
     John Carlos Baez (johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:08 JST John Carlos Baez

     in reply to

     • Martin Escardo

     @MartinEscardo - I'm always talking one-on-one to various people in a highly focused way. But I really like talking with a crowd of people about topics that range greatly in "sophistication level", where people get to know each other, joke around, but also put a lot of energy into figuring things out together.

     I enjoyed an excellent era on sci.physics.research and sci.math.research, and another excellent era much later on Twitter after I managed to get enough followers. The really depressing thing about Mathstodon is how many of my friends showed up here and soon gave up and left: Twitter made this place feel seem small and lonely. Now most of these people have gone to Bluesky.

     I am trying to figure out how to get people interested in having conversations here. I finally realized that I should ask more questions and act a bit less competent.

   • Embed this notice
     Martin Escardo (martinescardo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 03:44:10 JST Martin Escardo

     in reply to

     @johncarlosbaez writes

     "(I would like to talk about even more advanced stuff, but there's little audience for that here.)"

     Or almost anywhere?

     Of course, there are specialized communication forums for that. But what I like here is that we can reach more people than in the specialized forums.

     The ultimate specialized forum is a long 1-1 email thread with somebody you can relate to researchwise.

     I like all levels of (non-)specialization for communication, discussion and dissemination. Including this one.

   • Embed this notice
     Martin Escardo (martinescardo@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Sunday, 29-Dec-2024 04:25:26 JST Martin Escardo

     in reply to

     • julesh

     @julesh And who is going to maintain the code for 10-20 years in that case? The category theorists?

     I joined the categories mailing list 30+ years ago. At some point it was very active. It isn't any more. But it still exists and still runs, and somebody maintains the archives (and I have all emails from then on in a private folder).