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Perhaps each research area need a mastodon instance to provide a locus for discussion and sharing of new work? Organised nationally or trans-nationally.

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That's harder to manage. Universities have dedicated IT teams and infra; individual research groups, especially underfunded ones, do not, and organising research groups on any grand scale is like herding cats.

You don’t need to make it that complicated, really not.

Mastodon can already be a drop-in replacement for Twitter for many use cases. The biggest hurdle are, as ever, network effects. Not infrastructure, not features.

For me personally most of the people I care about already are on Mastodon. It was a smooth transition for me personally and I don’t miss a thing. All that needs to happen is for that to be also true for you and Mastodon is a drop in replacement.

On a personal level this is all true, but on an infrastructure level Mastodon can only survive and grow (and remain federated) with many well managed and well funded instances.

I’m really not too worried about that.

The biggest issue I can see developing is a Gmail-ification of Mastodon (with a lot of people being on a single instance).

That would be a pity – but in terms of freedom e-mail is still pretty great.

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