Stop Chasing Platforms. Own Your Audience Instead.

I know what it feels like to build something real on a platform, and then watch it disappear. For years, I ran RealScientists Nano, a rotation curation account. Each week, a new materials or nanoscientist took over the account. Each host shared their research, their life in the lab, and their questions. More than 120 scientists from around the world took part. During the pandemic, the account became a genuine lifeline. It gave scientists a space to connect, to laugh, and to feel less isolated.

In 2022 alone, the account generated close to a million impressions. Then Twitter changed, and that community slowly scattered. Scientists now ask me the same question constantly: “Where do we go next? What’s the new Twitter?” I understand why they ask this question. But I think it is the wrong question.

Science Twitter was something rare

What scientists lost when Twitter changed was not just a platform. It was a specific, almost accidental kind of community. This community let a nanoscientist in the Netherlands stumble into a conversation with a materials researcher in India. It let a PhD student ask a question publicly and get an answer from someone they would never otherwise meet. That low-barrier, high-serendipity environment was genuinely unusual. It did not exist before Twitter in quite that form, and no other platform has replicated it since.

The grief scientists feel about this loss is proportionate to the actual loss. A Nature survey confirmed what most scientists already knew. Thousands of scientists were cutting back on Twitter and felt genuine uncertainty about where to build and maintain community. Separately, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe tracked a 15 to 30-fold increase in hostile replies to her own account over two months. The platform that had been a relatively safe, intellectually rich space became something else entirely, and people mourned it.

That mourning is valid. What comes after it matters.

We have been here before, and we will be here again

After Twitter changed, scientists split across three platforms. Some went to Mastodon, drawn by its decentralized structure and science-friendly ethos. Some went to Bluesky. Some stayed on LinkedIn or retreated there. What happened next was entirely predictable, because we have seen it before.

Mastodon peaked at around 2.5 million active users in November 2022, and then dropped back to roughly 880,000. According to a New Scientist analysis, only 1.6% of scientists who publicly said they would move to Mastodon actually did. The platform was genuinely good in many ways. But it was too complex for most people to install, and without a critical mass of users, the serendipity never returned.

Bluesky is a different story, and a more hopeful one, at least on the surface. It now has over 40 million registered users, and a Nature poll found that 70% of their readers use it. The science community there is real and active. An analysis of 300,000 academic users showed that 18% of scholars migrated from Twitter to Bluesky between 2023 and early 2025. I made the move myself. Under the Microscope is now on Bluesky.

But here is the structural problem that does not go away: you rent space, you do not own it. Every platform is a landlord. The algorithm changes. The ownership changes. The business model changes. The momentum resets. You rebuild. You scatter. You rebuild again.

The platform era had an expiry date

This is not a Twitter-specific problem. It is a structural feature of how platforms work. Platforms grow by aggregating attention. They monetize by manipulating that attention. They decline when users lose trust or patience. The timeline varies. The outcome does not.

LinkedIn already shows the signs. AI-generated or bot-driven activity now accounts for approximately 25% of LinkedIn activity, according to estimates. AI-written comments are everywhere. They are generic, hollow, and indistinguishable at a glance from real engagement. LinkedIn’s own algorithm tries to filter these comments and struggles to do so. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Microsoft also owned Skype, a platform that once connected hundreds of millions of people and was quietly left to decline after the acquisition. The pattern is familiar.

AI has accelerated this decay. When the cost of fake engagement drops to near zero, every platform that relies on engagement signals as a quality measure degrades faster. LinkedIn is not collapsing. But it is becoming noisier, less trustworthy, and more exhausting to use. The scientists I speak to already feel this. They spend more time on the platform and get less from it.

The island era is already here

I am watching, and living, a shift away from platform-driven community. This shift moves toward what I call island-driven presence: owned, followable, multi-format spaces that do not depend on any platform’s survival.

Substack is the closest mainstream analogue. Nature published a piece in 2025 titled “Why scientists are flocking to Substack,” and the numbers are real. Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina built a newsletter during the pandemic that now reaches over 425,000 readers directly. No algorithm decides who sees it. No ownership change can scatter her audience. She owns the list.

This is what an island looks like in practice. An island is not necessarily a website, though it can be one. It is a space where your audience follows you, not a feed you happen to appear in. It can be a newsletter, a podcast, a membership hub, or a combination of formats. The key distinction is ownership: if the platform closes tomorrow, your audience can still find you.

Under the Microscope became an island. The podcast and the rotation curation account are now unified under one brand, across platforms. But the podcast audience belongs to us regardless of where the episodes are hosted. That was a deliberate choice. I made it after I watched Twitter change and understood that community built entirely on borrowed ground is fragile.

The scientists who build the most durable presence right now are not the ones with the most followers on any single platform. They are the ones who diversify: a newsletter here, a podcast there, a consistent personal site. This way, no single algorithm change can undo their work.

I do not know exactly when this shift will be complete. I do not know what the dominant form of scientific community-building will look like in ten years. But I am confident of one thing: the scientists who wait for the next Twitter will still wait. The ones who start building their island now, however small, however imperfect, will have something no platform migration can take from them.

What island are you building?

Related reading on The Science Talk

This piece accompanies the full story of how RealScientists Nano made the move from Twitter to Bluesky. It covers the practical and strategic reasons behind the transition, and what the transition means for the Under the Microscope community.

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