The reputational crisis provoked on Twitter by Elon Musk's erratic management , and the consequent drain of users and advertisers, raises concerns about the future of science communication in social networks.

Professor Ignacio López-Goñi has already asked about Twitter and scientific communication. Along the same lines, Pablo Otero Tranchero, from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, has reflected on what science loses if it loses Twitter.

Beyond the option of Mastodon as an alternative or plan B, the uncertain evolution of Twitter is leading to a profound reconsideration of the way in which both networking between communities of scientists and the knowledge dissemination of the results of research have been managed so far.

Fortunately, the richness and diversity of the digital ecosystem far transcends Twitter. Since Tim Berners-Lee released the world wide web software in 1991, the channels for sharing knowledge, expression, information, opinion, denunciation and criticism have only grown and multiplied.

One of the most important consequences of the Twitter crisis is that it has given its users the opportunity to review how they use the Internet and discover that since the commercial appropriation of the web and the proliferation of application marketplaces, a large part of everyday practices on network are carried out under the orbit of large technological platforms managed with proprietary software.

The researcher Mark Carrigan asks on the London School of Economics (LSE) blog whether the time hasn't come to rethink the academic use of Twitter and other commercial platforms.

The positive reception of Mastodon by the scientific communities allows us to glimpse a future for academic networking and the knowledge dissemination of science, which will have more to do with protocols (open vs. closed) than with platforms (free vs. proprietary).

Several years before this crisis, Mike Masnick, publisher of the Techdirt blog, had formulated -almost in core topic manifesto- that protocols and not platforms were the right technological approach to protect freedom of expression, escaping from the economic and digital infrastructure created by large technology companies.

After what Professor Carlos Scolari has called the "platform war the war of the platformsit seems that now what is coming is the war of protocols.

The rise of Mastodon has demonstrated the potential of the open protocol ActivityPub for the management of decentralized social networks. But there are other protocols that also aspire to lead this revolution, such as the project Matrix or the protocol AT, promoted by Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) under the Bluesky brand, which proposes to decentralize the experience of Username of social networks, giving them back control over the management of their personal data .

At the same time, Dorsey is offering up to $1 million per year to fund internet projects based on open protocols.

Among the protocols at skill, special attention should be paid to the nascent project Nostr, which promises to overcome the limitations of Twitter and Mastodon to create a censorship-resistant social network that frees users' identities from the domain names on the servers of a federated network .

In this process, which goes from platforms to protocols, it is foreseeable that the concern of scientists will accelerate transitions that will be slow and costly for universities to assume.

So says expert Andy Tattersall: "Academics can easily get off Twitter's place , but it will be much harder for their institutions."

It is clear that the social capital accumulated on Twitter around personal and corporate brands cannot be squandered. But it is also obvious that personal and corporate brands are degrading in an environment that remains in chaos and whose model future remains a big unknown.

In this scenario, having a plan B is reasonable. academic community But that decision should not disregard the lessons learned about the model of the Internet that commercial platforms have built and the lessons being learned from the shift to open protocols for managing our presence and our work on the network.