Mastodon Social Media Instances of Interest

The Mastodon social networks have attracted a lot more attention recently. I posted on concepts behind Mastodon, ActivityPub, and this federated style of social media a few years ago. To help anyone that is thinking of trying out Mastodon, the rest of this post highlights some Mastodon communities (instances) that are worth your while to look into. There is also a very good quick start guide, which although written with humanities scholars in mind, is largely applicable to anyone.

Finally, see this great page of academic Mastodon groups, user lists by discipline, and communities/instances. You can also try this Find Academics on Mastodon site for discovering accounts.

Continue reading “Mastodon Social Media Instances of Interest”

Switch to a Mastodon Social Network

The Mastodon social network system is the most promising advance I’ve seen recently toward establishing a better, more compelling social networking system.

I’ll explain why I think it’s worth leaving closed networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc. for Mastodon. I’d also like to say a little about how Mastodon works and mention something nice for the academic community. Perhaps you use something like Academia.edu or ResearchGate? Or just a general purpose social network? Then perhaps you should know about some other options. But first, what is Mastodon.

[Note: I’ve updated this several times since originally posting it, as things shift and more people use Mastodon. Most recent edit: 1 November 2022.] Continue reading “Switch to a Mastodon Social Network”

Google Plus – A Few Early Thoughts

After using it for a few days now, there’s a lot I really like about Google Plus. But some choices, I don’t understand. I want to love Google Plus and think that I will eventually but that’s predicated on all the promise it could deliver. And that’s not to say that there isn’t already really compelling stuff about Plus (hangouts and circles of course). This is not an in-depth analysis, rather just some cursory thoughts on Plus. It’s cross-posted in my Plus stream here. Continue reading “Google Plus – A Few Early Thoughts”