ELINET moved to Mastodon

ELINET moved to Mastodon

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Voor mijn Nederlandse volgers: Ik zit in het bestuur van Elinet, de European Literacy Policy Network, een Europees netwerk voor professionals op het gebied van geletterdheid. Zie meer hier.  Ik ben daar ook Co-chair `Digital Literacy. Volg ons via onze website en via Mastodon.

We move to Mastodon.

ELINET is not happy with Twitter. We discussed this and decided to leave Twitter and move to Mastodon. We are waiting for you. Please share this message broadly in your networks.

Please find us here: https://mastodon.education/@ELINET. Our name (handle) is @ELINET@mastodon.education.

Why did we leave Twitter? Our board member and co-chair of Digital Literacy Colin Harrison formulated our thoughts very eloquently in a letter he’s send to the Guardian, a mayor UK newspaper, on Wednesday, November 2. Read the letter here in the Guardian or below

Why leave Twitter?

Guardian Letters, Wednesday, November 2
Elon Musk’s dangerous view of democracy

If posting baseless conspiracy theory stories that gain tens of thousands of “likes” within hours (Nils Pratley on finance, 31 October) is Elon Musk’s idea of democratising social media, then I’m going to follow the lead of other European academics who have contacted me this week from Germany and the Netherlands to say that they are permanently unsubscribing from Twitter.
I’ve spent much of the last 10 years researching how best to educate young people into becoming safe, confident internet users, but this becomes more difficult every day. Academics and teachers need to let Musk know that his thoughtless and dangerous behaviour does not broaden democracy. Instead, it supports the view, already held by tens of millions of Americans, that if you don’t like the world that democracy has given you, you simply use money and violence (amplified by social media) to eliminate it.
Twitter is widely used by academics, but Elinet, a research consortium of literacy academics from 22 European nations, has already unsubscribed. Musk needs to learn what Kanye West learned last week: that social media actions have consequences.
Colin Harrison
Emeritus professor of literacy studies, University of Nottingham

Why use Mastodon?

Moving to Mastodon has to do with the critique we have on Twitter. A few reasons for choosing Mastodon (see more here https://mastodon.help/ and here https://joinmastodon.org/).
I’ve made a list of user-friendly manuals to help you to join Mastodon: see here
There, you also read more about reasons Mastodon could be interesting for you. You can find almost everything concerning Mastodon in the Mastodon Documentation here.

  • Decentralized. Instant global communication is too important to belong to one company. Each Mastodon server is a completely independent entity, able to interoperate with others to form one global social network.
  • Open Source. Mastodon is free and open-source software. We believe in your right to use, copy, study and change Mastodon as you see fit, and we benefit from contributions from the community.
  • Not for Sale.  Your feed is curated and created by you. We will never serve ads or push profiles for you to see. That means your data and your time are yours and yours alone.
  • Built on open web protocols, Mastodon can speak with any other platform that implements ActivityPub. With one account, you get access to a whole universe of social apps—the Fediverse.

Because Mastodon doesn’t use algorithms, you will feel in another world. You don’t get all kinds of offers you don’t want and no advertising at all. You search for people and interesting information yourself. It’s a nice house to be in. I wrote about this feeling on my website here.

How can I join?

A few steps you have to take: ( See also the list of user-friendly manuals to help you to join Mastodon:  here  )

  1. Join Mastodon. Mastodon is not a single website. To use it, you need to make an account with a provider—we call them servers—that lets you connect with other people across Mastodon. There are many servers around. You can see a lot of them here  Some of the servers are set up around specific themes, you can also choose a server in your home country.
    ELINET has joined a server in the Netherlands for education https://mastodon.education If you find it easy to join us there, here is the invitation link https://mastodon.education/invite/dWwqvYph
  2. Next steps: (some terminology: a Toot = a Tweet, Boosting is retweeting (without a comment),
    1. Make yourself known. Tell something about yourself in your Bio, and Toot an Introduction. Whatever you want to say (work, personal, motivation for being here). Share Introductions. Pin it to your timeline 📍People want to follow you easier when you have a bio and a picture.
    2. Boost posts you think are worthy, so others can discover you and new content. Boost generously (this is like retweet (but without the possibility to comment). 🎺 You are *not* on the twitter site. There is no algorithm here.
    3. Don’t obsess on replicating your Twitter follows on Mastodon; let it be its own experience, and grow it organically. Follow anyone you miss from Twitter, but this isn’t a 1:1 replacement; have fun, follow your instincts. Follow anyone you think looks potentially interesting; you can always unfollow later, and they may lead you to new people via boosted posts. Follow ELINET @ELINET@mastodon.education
    4. Use a lot of hashtags, e.g #Literacy, #Digitalliteracy etc. You can also find toots, searching for ##  And others can see you, doing the same.
    5. Use Capitals in hashtags. (This is better for the blind people who let the messages read to them)
    6. Don’t auto cross-post from #twitter. It looks weird, no context.
    7. Just start and have fun 😉
  3. Use the manuals or, if that doesn’t work, ask me, Jeroen Clemens

Other places on the Fediverse.

This one is for all the new people on #Mastodon: did you know that the #fediverse has more than just a microblogging replacement? And that they can all interoperate with your Mastodon account?  I’m going to replace all those old ones too. Do the same!

Do it now.

Join us asap, please. Hope to see all our followers (and more) on Mastodon.
Again: ELINET is already on Mastodon. Our account name is @ELINET@mastodon.education. Find us here: https://mastodon.education/@ELINET

 

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