Note: Digital communication for researchers, beyond Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and Github

Why you should care about open alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, beyond that short period when you were angry, sad or disgusted about Elon Musk taking over Twitter? The alternatives, as long as they are based on open standards, constitute a completely different model than the heavily siloed commercial platforms. That is what makes them so important for open science communication.

The alternative open networks together form the Fediverse (short for: federation universe), of services that federate. This means they work together, not as silos like the commercial social media services. This is how the World Wide Web was intended to work! This federated social media is based on the Activity Pub standard, established by the World Wide Web Consortium. Activity Pub is just the latest attempt of an open standard for social media, and Mastodon just the most popular app for it. All of it is better that commercial social media, which is the opposite on purpose, commercialization of the web through building walls between services. This is done in order to keep users locked in, to push them commercial and political ads, and sell outreach.

Instead of some blockchain fantasies, or the next big thing, the Fediverse exists, flourishes and has working modes of community moderation. Which makes it the perfect tool for activists, journalists and scientists. We just need to care more for platform politics and take part. Don’t wait for your audience to be there, go there and bring your audience. Creating an account on open social media means preparing for this and other commercial services to go down (for example through mismanagement).

Say you are not ready to give up on the platforms you are currently using. Still, in your digital communication you can also implement some important strategies:

• Make content available outside the platforms, and refer to it from the platforms (your own archive!). This way we maintain independence and are ready for the moment when the platform changes its technology or ceases operations.
• When posting to feeds, always offer open feeds aswell, RSS and Activity Pub (Mastodon etc.). If there is a Twitter, Instagram or Youtube channel, there should also be an open alternative.
• The same applies to chats, Discord, Telegram and so on are platform services we don’t need to depend on, open federated (i.e. decentralized standards) like Matrix are more sustainable.
• 4. code and research data only on Github are not sustainably published. Again, there are decentralized and federated alternatives such as Gitlab and Gitea, in addition, institutional repositories should have a sustainably available version.

You might be asking yourself, what about Bluesky though, or the new Instagram features? I am refering to reporting like this: “Meta is building a decentralized, text-based social network“, regarding the rumours about Facebook/Meta doing something with Activity Pub. Basically what Facebook claims to be doing here, 8 years after ending both RSS and XMPP support on it’s services and by that fortifying their data silo, is to introduce Activity Pub compatible Instagram notes. Why should we trust the companies with the worst politics of interoperability to sustain real interoperability ? When it comes to interoperability for all their service, they will just do the legal minimum of the EU Digital Services Act and that’s it. Same for Bluesky, which evolved out of Twitter. 10 years after ending RSS support on Twitter (basically open feeds!), Bluesky wants us to trust them to make a better open feed standard than the already existing W3C consortium Activity Pub standard…