I'm not him, but now that I think about it, there is a tendency for many people to prefer the more generalized term.
Where scientists don't tend to use the word scientist as much, I can't recall ever seeing the term in a journal article for instance. (I don't read many, but I'll read an abstract here and there) I'm not sure why. I expect it's some categorization thing, where not all scientists perform research, so researcher is the more precise term. I'm just guessing as to the reason though, I do not have a PhD.
It's been this way for weeks, actually. I haven't seen a graph of the uptime, but I'm sure one would look extremely ugly, based on my own user experience.
This right here is an alt, and despite the fact that I don't prefer to comment from it, since I won't necessarily check in soon to see replies, it's seeing some heavy use.
The attacks a few weeks ago weren't a one-off, they never stopped. It seems down maybe half the time or so?
One of the many ways we (all of Lemmy) are not quite ready for the mainstream yet, we still have basic technical/security issues to resolve. Soon, though.