For those who were not at last week’s Mastodon event, you missed out!
The workshop, ‘Mastodon for Open Science’, Babette engaged the audience, showcasing the journey towards the transition to Mastodon and why it is essential to use social media platforms that are Open.

Touching on the topic of outreach, the discussion led towards what does it mean to be using social media. Engagement numbers do not present the whole picture, which is the promise of using more popular platforms (i.e. Bluesky) to engage with the audience. Although more people are registered to Bluesky, the impact of posts in Mastodon is far greater (see image). As the community surrounding accounts one follows/are followers is organic, discussions prompted on the platform are active when compared to algorithm driven engagement. Thus, rather than shouting to a person in a club hoping to engage with them, Mastodon provides a cozy cafe where one doesn’t have to shout to chat to the person next to them.
Of course, this sparked the discussion whether using Mastodon puts a fence to those engaged with Mastodon and avoids social media users who focus on scrolling through content. Bringing back to the idea of using social media to build community, if the aim of using a social media platform is to promote outreach, then Mastodon may indeed be more limited (unless more people use it). But to engage with like-minded fellows, Mastodon provides an opportunity to keep discussions with the people you want to engage with. If one thinks this is intolerant, seeing as Truth Social was started due to intolerance being kicked out of Twitter (back in the day), using Mastodon to engage with an Open community seems rather reasonable.
Still skeptical about using Mastodon? You can see one of the particpants created an account during the workshop. The response was postiive, demonstrating engagement with Mastodon is possible, especially when striving to create one’s own community.

What are your thoughts on the discussion? Curious to discuss more?
Don’t hesitate to reach out!