Chroknowlogy

I’ve been thinking about something like an instance Community Pledge becoming commonplace. Mastodon instances tend to post rules, user expectations, a tiny bit of info about administrative practices. This helps cultivate the Mastodon region of the fediverse. But, and I don’t mean the following as criticism, most instances have not communicated what their administrative commitments to their community are. Perhaps because until recently things have been on a smaller scale & practices are maturing.

Here is what I’ve been considering. It’s a thought process but not at all, thought-out. There are problems but I’d like to put the idea out there in case others have worried about this and perhaps, something can come of it. This is written in 500 character paragraphs because I was originally going to thread it in Mastodon but it got too long.

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.