[TimMurnaghan]

In the end this could work out well. People go where the stuff that they want is. I occasionally dust off an old twitter account when I want to reach an org which is otherwise hiding any means of human contact. So if scihub does manage to make a meaningful presence somewhere like mastodon that's all for the good - and just hastens the decline of twitter.

[elliekelly]

Is there any reason to believe mastodon is “better” than twitter though? I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say about twitter and I’m neither a twitter nor mastodon user but I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues? And it seems like it would come with its own set of issues when it isn’t centralized.

[talhah]

> I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues? Scihub can host their own mastodon instance which means they have power of moderation, Twitter cannot impose whatever rules they want to.

Being federated means posts on Scihub can be seen on other mastodon instances. This allows Scihub to allow a select few users to join their instance without limiting visibility of their content as it can still be seen and interacted with through another mastodon instance.