FOSS Academic

FOSS Academic

Robert Gehl

Hi! This blog is meant to do two things. First, one goal is to explore life as a “FOSS Academic” – someone who uses Free and Open Source technologies to do academic work. I’m hoping that my discussions of FOSS technologies in an academic setting help others – students, professors, university administrators – understand the benefits and values of FOSS in the academy. I’m not a developer, but I am a professor who’s been using FOSS to do his job for over a decade. I call this goal of exploring FOSS tools in the academy Goal 1. Second, this blog has Goal 2: writing a book about a FOSS topic. After some consideration, I decided to write a book about Mastodon and the fediverse. The book is out now! Sometimes, the two topics will collide in a single post. My intent here is to be more open about my own research process and writing.

https://fossacademic.tech/

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Latest posts

• A Guide for #AOIR2025 and Social Media 2025-08-31 09:00pm
• Reimplemented and It Feels So Good 2025-08-24 09:00pm
• What Does This Z Key Do?: Thoughts on Zotero versus Zettlr 2025-08-18 09:00pm
• The Plight of the Reviewer: Lessons from AI Generation and Software 2025-08-05 09:00pm
• Sharing my book, one random bit at a time 2025-06-29 09:00pm
• Move Slowly and Build Bridges Cover Reveal 2025-06-01 09:00pm
• I Ain't Gonna Work on ChatGPT's Farm No More 2025-05-07 09:00pm
• Copyediting: The Bane of the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream 2025-04-05 09:00pm
• FOSS Academic Workflow, 2025 Edition 2025-03-14 09:00pm
• Standards War? 2025-03-04 08:00pm
• The ASM Bibliography is Going Home 2025-02-21 08:00pm
• You Can Post Your Way Out of Fascism if You Own the Means of Posting 2025-02-14 08:00pm
• Introducing: the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers 2025-01-31 08:00pm
• Making Alternative Social Media in a Corporate Social Media World 2025-01-17 08:00pm
• Watching Threads, Bluesky and Decentralization, and ActivityPub Trust and Safety 2025-01-09 08:00pm
• Threads and the Failure of Global Content Moderation 2024-12-12 08:00pm
• Marp + BeautifulSoup 2024-12-06 08:00pm
• ASM Update: Can this platform survive? 2024-12-05 08:00pm
• Marp! 2024-11-30 08:00pm
• ASM update: libraries, libraries everywhere 2024-11-28 08:00pm
• ASM Update: New Research Edition 2024-11-21 08:00pm
• ASM Updates: Bluesky growth continues 2024-11-15 08:00pm
• ASM Update for November 8, 2024 2024-11-07 08:00pm
• Hey, Journalists: X is Now Truth Social 2024-11-07 08:00pm
• York Circle Lecture: Fleeing Facebook and Exiting X 2024-11-04 08:00pm
• From reverse engineering to building bridges: adventures in alternative social media 2024-10-17 09:00pm
• Goodbye, Firefox? 2024-09-17 09:00pm
• ASM Update: Mastodon Research Ethics and the Ethical Quandaries of Tech Advocacy 2024-09-05 09:00pm
• Zotero 7 Early Review 2024-08-12 09:00pm
• Hitting a Nerve and Presenting at IETF 2024-07-24 09:00pm
• On Threads's Blocklist 2024-06-27 09:00pm
• Maven Ain't So Mavenly 2024-06-11 09:00pm
• Thinking of Switching to Linux, Fellow Academics? 2024-05-23 09:00pm
• Decentralization or Noncentralization, Bluesky or the Fediverse? 2024-04-29 09:00pm
• Reading the Online Harms Act with my Fediverse Admin Hat On 2024-04-09 09:00pm
• Researching the Fediverse: Instances and Individuals 2024-03-13 09:00pm
• Move Slowly and Build Bridges -- Preview 2024-02-10 08:00pm
• Thoughts on Threads, or Is Mark Zuckerberg Jesus? 2023-12-15 08:00pm
• Ethics and Codes of Conduct on Mastodon 2023-11-21 08:00pm
• How Universities Lost the Internet 2023-11-09 08:00pm
• Alternative Social Media Preconference at AoIR 2023-10-18 09:00pm
• ActivityPub, the Non-Standard Standard 2023-10-14 09:00pm
• A defense of the humble, importable blocklist 2023-09-19 09:00pm
• ASM update, Bibliography Edition 2023-09-07 09:00pm
• Move Slowly and Build Bridges to be published by Oxford University Press 2023-08-16 09:00pm
• ASM update, August 12 2023 2023-08-11 09:00pm
• Seeking Grad Students and Postdocs 2023-07-01 09:00pm
• ASM Update, June 25 2023 2023-06-24 09:00pm
• ASM Update, June 16 2023 2023-06-15 09:00pm
• Reading the Minutes of the Social Web Working Group, part 2 2023-05-08 09:00pm
• AoIR Social's Code of Conduct 2023-03-14 09:00pm
• AOIR.social! 2023-03-02 08:00pm
• Bumps, Slumps and the Killer Hype Cycle 2023-02-09 08:00pm
• Reading the Minutes of the Social Web Working Group, part 1 2023-01-19 08:00pm
• FOSS Academic Year in Review 2022 2023-01-02 08:00pm
• A Very Playvicious Christmas 2022-12-23 08:00pm
• Two New Publications 2022-12-18 08:00pm
• AOIR.social? 2022-12-10 08:00pm
• FOSS Finds, Content Moderation webinar 2022-12-08 08:00pm
• Twitter Isn't That Important 2022-11-18 08:00pm
• Expanding The Conversation (notes on the Pew Alternative Social Media Report) 2022-10-24 09:00pm
• More Mastodon Scraping Without Consent (Notes on Nobre et al 2022) 2022-10-17 09:00pm
• A Deep Dive into a Zotero Workflow 2022-10-04 09:00pm
• FOSS Finds, Scuttlebutt Edition 2022-09-12 09:00pm
• Movin' North 2022-08-16 09:00pm
• FOSS Finds, On Demand Edition 2022-06-28 09:00pm
• (I'm) Mashing That Subscribe Button 2022-05-25 09:00pm
• FOSS Finds, StoryCorps Edition 2022-04-22 09:00pm
• FOSS Interview Workflow 2022-04-16 09:00pm
• New Book, Old Book 2022-03-25 09:00pm
• FOSS Finds 2022-03-06 08:00pm
• Coding Freedom, by Biella Coleman 2022-02-14 08:00pm
• I Have Settled on Zettlr 2022-02-02 08:00pm
• FOSS Finds 2022-01-28 08:00pm
• Very Kool + Jellyfin 2022-01-25 08:00pm
• FOSS Finds, Environment and Labor Edition 2022-01-20 08:00pm
• FOSS Finds 2022-01-10 08:00pm
• Goal 2, Initiate 2022-01-05 08:00pm
• Test post for Mastodon Comments 2021-12-15 08:00pm
• Tuxies 2021 2021-12-10 08:00pm
• In Praise of Mastodon, Again 2021-10-29 09:00pm
• Nextcloud Appointments! 2021-09-24 09:00pm
• September update 2021-09-09 09:00pm
• Manjaro Mania! 2021-07-17 09:00pm
• (Almost) De-Googled Research 2021-07-02 09:00pm
• A Vacation and F-Droid 2021-06-23 09:00pm
• FALD Updates 2021-05-13 09:00pm
• Messin' with Wireguard 2021-04-28 09:00pm
• Sudo Install Dark Mode 2021-04-22 09:00pm
• Review of Zotero's New PDF Annotation Features 2021-04-01 09:00pm
• RM Mess 2021-03-27 09:00pm
• Cutting-Edge Zotero 2021-03-18 09:00pm
• GDPR Compliance 2021-03-10 08:00pm
• PDF Hell 2021-03-09 08:00pm
• A Lost Weekend of Lost Posts 2021-02-27 08:00pm
• Linux on Mars 2021-02-20 08:00pm
• A Survey for Mastodon Developers, Admins, and Users 2021-02-08 08:00pm
• I Asked Mastodon About FOSS for Academics. Here's What They Said 2021-02-06 08:00pm
• Staticman Comments Test Post 2021-01-23 08:00pm
• 20 Years of Wikipedia 2021-01-19 08:00pm
• In Praise of Mastodon After an Insurrection, or, What if Donald Trump Had Joined Mastodon? 2021-01-07 08:00pm
• Minor Update -- New Publication, No More Hyvor 2020-12-28 08:00pm
• My Workflow 2020-12-26 08:00pm
• Minor Update -- Tagging System 2020-12-19 08:00pm
• My FOSS Journey 2020-12-14 08:00pm
• The Tuxies, Academic Style 2020-12-09 08:00pm
• Dreaming in Code 2020-12-05 08:00pm
• Zotero Tips and Tricks 2020-11-30 08:00pm
• Introduction 2020-11-26 08:00pm
• Alternative Social Media: Canadian Edition 2020-01-14 08:00pm
• Presentation at the University of Calgary: Dark Web, Alternative Social Media, and Memes 2019-03-01 08:00pm
• Facebook Algorithms and Alternative Social Media 2018-10-29 09:00pm
• #deletefacebook 2018-03-22 09:00pm
• Farewell, Galaxy2 2017-10-25 09:00pm
• What Would Feminist Alternative Social Media Look Like? 2016-09-11 09:00pm
• Fibreculture special issue on Activism and Technology 2016-01-19 08:00pm
• Two new alternative social media publications 2015-07-01 09:00pm
• Facebook and Activist Pages 2015-06-06 09:00pm
• Building a Better Twitter: a study of rstat.us, Twister, Quitter, and Gnu social 2015-04-15 09:00pm