archaeo.social

Archaeology in the Fediverse and the future of scholarly social media

Joe Roe

Zack Batist

These slides

https://archaeo-social.github.io/archeofoss23_fediverse
https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10362684
archaeo-social/archeofoss23_fediverse

The Fediverse

• Decentralised
• Federated
• Independent

Per Axbom, https://axbom.com/fediverse/

In short, the Fediverse is a (large!) collection of social media software—that tend to be, but aren’t necessarily, free and open source—that are:

• Decentralised: there’s no single entity that controls the social network (unlike corporate social media)
• Federated: different instances of each tool, and different tools, can talk to each other via an open standard (usually ActivityPub, but there are others)
• Independent: even though they can communicate with each other, individual instances are fully under the control of whoever is running them, who can choose if and how they want to participate in the wider network

A frequently used metaphor is email. We all have an email address, and we can all email anyone else with an email address. But there’s no one Email Platform. Instead, you have an address at a server, which could be a company like Google, or your university, or your own domain, and those servers pass messages between each other using an open protocol.

The Fediverse is just that (very old) model, applied to social media.

Mastodon

https://joinmastodon.org/

To see how this works from a user’s perspective, which since the collapse of Twitter has become by the far the best known node of the Fediverse.

Basically Mastodon looks a lot like Twitter and works in exactly the same way, most of the time. The difference is, instead of signing up at a centralised mastodon.com, you choose an independent server—so your Mastodon handle is not just e.g. “joe” but “joe at archaeo.social”—and access the network through that. But just like having an email address at gmail doesn’t mean you can only email other people with gmail, you can interact (follow, be followed by, message, etc.) anyone and any federated server.

The future of scholarly social media?

As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon […] demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover […]

Mastodon over Mammon: towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge
Björn Brembs, Adrian Lenardic, Peter Murray-Rust, Leslie Chan and Dasapta Erwin Irawan
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230207

But most of us that are excited about the Fediverse don’t just like it because it gives us Twitter without the megalomaniac CEO. The idea is to build something better, that avoids repeating the mistakes of previous platforms and remains resilient to corporate capture in the long term.

Björn Brembs and colleagues in particular have made a persuasive case that because scholarly communication is in itself a public good—and usually a publicly funded one—it belongs in common ownership, not under the control of monopolistic tech companies. They see in Mastodon and the Fediverse a “golden opportunity” for universities, scholarly societies and other academic bodies to achieve this.

Of course, that isn’t going to happen by itself – someone (us!) needs to step up and organise.

https://about.archaeo.social

That’s where we come in. I started archaeo.social last year, in the midst of the “great migration”, with the aim of providing a home for archaeologists in the Fediverse (specifically, Mastodon, at that time) and soon after Zack kindly agreed to help out.

We are, or we aspire to be, a bottom-up collective providing open, federated social media services for our discipline. At the moment that consists of the Mastodon server, open to anyone interested in archaeology. And a Matrix server (basically a federated IRC, Discord, etc.) which hosts both general discussion and self-contained spaces (like Slack) for a number of societies and working groups. Get in touch if you’re interested in hosting your group there!

https://opencollective.com/archaeosocial

https://github.com/orgs/archaeo-social/discussions

We currently do all the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stuff on GitHub (maybe a bit of a contradiction). Including maintaining a community-generated list of new services we’d like to run in the future. The constraining factor is money: we’re reliant on donations through OpenCollective, and currently the donation base isn’t quite enough to support new services.

Archaeologists in the Fediverse

Archaeologists of Mastodon:

• 258 users
• 59 servers

server	n
archaeo.social	68
mastodon.social	28
fediscience.org	15
mas.to	15
mastodonapp.uk	12
mastodon.online	10
mastodon.scot	10
scholar.social	10
other	90

Lots of our colleagues are using Mastodon, especially after the “great migration” from Twitter in late 2022. By design it’s not so easy to track exactly how many. Nika Shilobod’s “Archaeologists of Mastodon” lists 259 users across 59 servers – but it’s opt-in, so a pretty significant underestimate.

Archaeologists in the Fediverse

archaeo.social:

764 users (230 active)

• 46% researchers¹
• 28% early career researchers
• 20% organisations, bots, etc.
• 12% unidentifiable

Languages:
English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, Russian, …

https://fedidb.org/network/instance/archaeo.social

archaeo.social, which is targeted at archaeologists and people interested in archaeology, has 764 users (and growing) as of yesterday, 230 which are “active” And archaeo.social has diverse demographics (we don’t systematically collect data on our users, this is just a quick estimate based on looking through a sample of people’s public profiles).

1. Based on a random sample of 50 public profiles.

Panel discussion

Lorna-Jane Richardson
Media deconvergence and digital public archaeology

María Coto-Sarmiento
On the pessimistic side: Is the fediverse a viable alternative to X for Spanish researchers?

Judit del Río, Aris Politopoulos, Colleen Morgan
Making and Breaking: Anarchist Praxis, Archaeological Communities, and Social Media

• Today’s panellists
• We’ll hold questions/discussion to the end