Academic Mastodon Lists and Groups
In November 2022 many academics have created accounts on Mastodon, a federated microblogging service. Mastodon is decentralized like the old forums and mailing lists, but you can easily cross-post from one Mastodon server to another and search across servers with hashtags to find posts of common interest. Because each instance is moderated by members, it can set its own standard for acceptable behaviour rather than trying to get Germans and Americans to agree whether the Horst-Wesel-Lied is protected speech (although two of the biggest mastodon instances are barely moderated at all, so careful where you post! Mastodon is open-source software like WordPress or bulletin board software, so it gets used by people who say and do things you hate). Because its hard to find old Mastodon posts and I delete them after a few months anyways, here is a one-stop shop for the new instances, lists of accounts with a common theme, and groups I have found (Mastodon groups work like mailing lists, they take incoming messages and broadcast them to subscribers).
Welcome to historians.social, a community about history for people who study it and want to know more about it!
Liz Covart, Ph.D.@lizcovart
The server https://c18.masto.host/about/more was added during the Great Migration. “This is a Mastodon instance for scholars of eighteenth-century global culture, history, literature, philosophy, and ideas.”
Many scientists have already arrived here on Mastodon.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any from my own discipline (Iranian Studies). Therefore, I have created a list to collect accounts, follow them all at once and change this: https://florisre.github.io/mastodon-iranian-studies/.
Feel free to contact me at @floris with suggestions or if you would like to be on that list yourself!
Floris @Floris
If anybody wants to start a blog on maritime history… I have a platform for you.
Dr Sam McLean @canadian_errant
We now have 257 people on the list “Philosophers & Philosophy Teachers on Mastodon” (with an easy method to follow multiple accounts at once)! https://eyssette.github.io/Mastodon-Philosophy/
You can subscribe to the group https://a.gup.pe/u/philosophy and use @philosophy and #Philosophy for your toots about philosophy.
Cédric Eyssette @eyssette
Send me a DM if you want to be on the list. If I take more than a day or 2 to reply, it means that I didn’t get your message.
PhD students of #Mastodon, I have created a Mastodon group for sharing PhD-related posts using @phdstudents when posting a PhD student toot. Let’s help the group to grow and share our PhD student experiences.
Matthew Thompson @matthewthompson
With more people likely to be coming over to #Mastodon, I thought it would be useful to highlight the #LawFedi list, with over 700 lawyers, including practitioners and academics from around the world. The list is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nE8WxgwTFCuVeFA8ZfOW0qonJTSnI_d6EBSJ4E9JqtI/edit
If you would like to join, here’s how https://forms.gle/AKMhScVySmS93LbK9
I keep an eye on the list for spam, trolls, and errors. #law #lawyers #lawProfs
Heidi Li Feldman @heidilifeldman
Dear Neolatinists! As groups seem to be becoming a thing on #Mastodon, please note that there is a group on #Neolatin as well. Just follow @neolatin and tag it when you toot. Your toots will get boosted and be read by other Neolatinists.
Alexander Winkler @awinkler@openbiblio.social
@nevenjovanovic
@paolomonella
@digneolatin
Now over 1,000 history scholars, teachers, and graduate students on our #histodons list:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zmuH0ffMpCNOEjsReMk5iiqGwiUvhO2TtrM8QKu98SE/htmlview#
Konrad M. Lawson @konrad
Josh Braun @josh, “Comm and Media studies list” https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vFWP_eBXrjeDqDkmT6PEbxnsZ_QFC4OgEgUHTrJWhhQ/edit?usp=sharing
https://scholar.social/@hendrikerz has a list of lists of academics on mastodon https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon/blob/main/README.md
There’s a whole pile of finance people on Mastodon. Financial Times FT Alphaville has its own account and its own server: @FTAV@alphaville.club — organisations and companies are recommended to set up their own servers. There’s econtwitter.net for economics enthusiasts.
David Gerard, “If Twitter goes down, where will crypto Twitter migrate to?” (22 November 2022) link
Leslie Carhart, “Infosec Mastodon Lists!” https://tisiphone.net/2022/11/10/infosec-mastodon-lists/
And don’t forget @histodons for history-related toots and @antiquidons for ancient toots!
By popular demand elseweb I have created the group @sffbipoc — for the #BIPOC #writingcommunity in #SFF to post items of mutual interest & to find and boost each others’ work!
Self-promotion by #BIPOC members encouraged!
(Follow to get all the posts; tag the group for your posts to reach everyone following. I do not control it I only made it exist!)
SL Huang @slhuang
I will continue updating this post as I find and boost other lists and groups! I don’t know how people use twitter or how other people use Mastodon, and because Mastodon currently dumps all posts you are subscribed to in one timeline, you have to decide what has a good signal to noise ratio and a low enough volume of posts.
If anyone does not want their list, group, or instance to be on this page please let me know.
What instance to join is a hard problem, because many have capped membership while they recruit new mods or see how many of the new users actually post. A corporate site like Facebook can hire and train new mods but a human-sized, volunteer-run site needs to find them and teach them informally. Servers are having to answer new questions like “can our police department / intelligence agency be on your instance?” and other servers move closer or further away in response (infosec.exchange said yes and some people on other instances are not happy). An account on eldrich.cafe suggested the following list of servers with effective moderation consistent with their values as of November 2022:
- eldritch.cafe
- weirder.earth
- scholar.social
- rage.love
- mastodon.art
- wandering.shop
- lgbt.io
- tenforward.social
- writing.exchange
- tech.lgbt
- solarpunk.moe
- aus.social
- blacktwitter.io
- laserdisc.party
- queer.party
- dragonscave.space
- zirk.us
- chaos.social
- hackers.town
- todon.nl
- octodon.social
- glitch.social
Instances to avoid because they have a history of being effectively unmoderated due to their enormous user base which means racism, bigotry and other shit runs rampant with their moderators turning a blind eye most of the time:
- mastodon.social
- mastodon.online
Instances to absolutely stay away from because they have a history and proven track record of harboring bad actors involved in instigating hate, racism, and all sorts of other violence:
- monads.online
- elekk.xyz
- myasstodon.xyz
Their advice is broadly consistent with my experience as of November 2022.
Robert Klingett @blindscribe as a list of instances with at least one black or other visible minority moderator at https://scholar.social/@blindscribe@writing.exchange/109388124972769177 (Google doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/12pTmSMpq8lMYyYlHT25DgTmdMmE6ysUyRHGiq-E4XdQ/edit?usp=sharingp )
If you want to join Mastodon, a general guide to smaller instances is https://instances.social/
Instead of supporting me for this post, how about donating $2/month to your local fediverse admin! Running the software and moderating people takes time and money, but if everyone chips in they don’t have to contribute much.
Edit 2024-03-20: added link to Google Doc by Klingett
