On October 18, at 8.30 am, a group of about 30 Internet Scholars gathered for a Association of Internet Researchers preconference, called "Building an Alternative Social Media Network."
In a couple days, I head to Philadelphia for the 2023 version of the Association of Internet Researchers conference. It's my favorite conference. And to give AOIR even more credit, they were one of the first professional academic organizations to set up their own Mastodon instance (I participate in that project by...
So I tried to take part in Fediforum today, but I wasn't really able to participate. My initial idea was to get into a debate with my friend Roel Roscam Abbing, who is an incredibly deep thinker and is writing what will no doubt be a foundational dissertation about the fediverse. We were hoping to prompt a...
This is a minor update, but I hope it's useful to anyone interested in doing alternative social media research. I've long hosted a Zotero group, the Social Media Alternatives Project, which has a library. As much as I love Zotero, though, I've not had much luck with groups for fostering public discussion. Their...
I am very excited to announce that my next book, Move Slowly and Building Bridges: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and the Struggle for Democratic Social Media will be published by Oxford University Press.
It's been a while, thanks to drama with rent and apartments (welcome to Toronto, Robert), but I'm back with another Alternative Social Media update!
This is just a short note to announce that, thanks to some generous funding at York University, I am recruiting graduate students (MA and PhD) as well as post-docs. I'd like to work with folks on alternative social media, in particular. Methodologically, I tend to use qualitative approaches, such as digital...
This update focuses on the University of Warwick Mastodon Research Symposium.
NB: I've started an alternative social media email list, and I regularly email the list with news from the world of ASM. Since many ASM are free and open source software, it occurred to me that I should mirror those emails here on the blog. These might be the next iteration of "FOSS finds," a series I ran in...
NB: This is the second in a series of posts where I will share my notes on my readings of the minutes of the Social Web Working Group. The first one is here. Future posts to come.
So, as I noted in the last post, AoIR.social is live! It's in beta testing, so to speak, as we bring on board moderators to learn the system before rolling out to the Association of Internet Researchers membership.
A few months ago, I wrote about the possibility of the Association on Internet Researchers running their own Mastodon instance. I discussed the major concerns the organization had about running such an instance, and the direction the project is heading.
