Should Scientists Join Mastodon? The Impact of Newcomers and Algorithmic Recommendations on the Open-Source Social-Media Platform
The open-sourced platform has attracted more than half a million users in just a week, but should scientists join? We examine the pros and cons.
Beset by bugs, shorn of around half of its staff and with an idiosyncratic new owner who is changing the rules on a whim, Twitter is turning from a must-use social-media platform into one that many people, including scientists, are becoming wary of.
Mastodon was named after an extinct creature that last walked the Earth 10,000 years ago. The main difference between Mastodon and Twitter is that whereas Twitter is centrally controlled by a single company, Mastodon is decentralized.
Multiple accounts can be registered under an instance, if you want to use a Mastodon server to create and moderate your own community.
Unlike Twitter, where missives are limited to 280 characters, you can post up to 11,000 characters in a single Mastodon message — known as a toot. Another difference is how users encounter content: Twitter’s algorithmic recommendations are nowhere to be seen on Mastodon. Who you follow and what they share dictates what you see.
For researchers who are used to the criticisms of academia that often come with quoted tweets, Mastodon can be refreshing, says Brown. But it’s also a challenge to prove that your research has a public impact when you’re preaching to the converted, he adds. As more people sign up, I think it will be a critical mass thing, says Flick who believes this will change over time.
That conversation comes with caveats, however. Mastodon is tension caused by the new arrivals, many of which have formed habits on the online social networking site. Journalists who share their work without engaging in too many conversations have been chastised by longer-term users, and some early Mastodon Adopters fear the new arrivals will shift the proper way to share information on social media.
Other issues might cause users to take a break. Mastodon categorizes conversations around hashtags much more frequently than Twitter, partly because of its lack of algorithmic recommendations. But there isn’t an obvious way to corral conversations about a particular academic paper, using a DOI reference as a hashtag, because of the way that the platform’s technical architecture works. A user has asked for the functionality to be introduced after they reported the issue.
For that reason, Brown suggests that scientists switching to Mastodon don’t rush to delete their Twitter accounts. “At the very least, they might still use both services,” he says.
“You can connect your Mastodon compatible server to the Fediverse in minutes”, wrote a co-authored post by Cloudflare employees. You do not need to worry about maintaining or protecting it from abuse or attacks because Cloudflare will do it for you.
If that is not frightening, then you should be aware that most of Wildebeest’s features can be tried out for free, but only if you pay for an Images plan, which starts at $5 a month.