It's a great idea but driving eyeballs there would be so difficult given how conservative academics can be with regard to where they prefer to communicate.

I'd go a step further -- there was never a public forum on Big tech for the past 15 years. Big tech was always the illusion of a thing and not the thing itself.

Open protocols are the only way to have a real public forum.

Genuine question, as a non-Twitter user, what was Twitter-style discussion that held value like? I only ever heard about it being a quick source for certain official outlets to broadcast to others (which does have value but that's not discussion), a place for political fighting and harassment, and about how you weren't able to have nuanced discussions within the small character limit.

I know one advantage of Mastodon is that the character limit is much higher.