April 19, 2023 by Amanda Visconti

Learning Mastodon (and LinkedIn!?), leaving Twitter

I hope to update this post with advice as I learn more about how to use Mastodon and LinkedIn for the kinds of scholarly and learning community I used to get from Twitter (alas).

Going forward, the best places to now find me on social media are now:

Mastodon

Useful info will be added here as I learn it:

  • The Twitter iOS app I used for almost 14 years (Tapbots’ Tweetbot) was almost perfect, so I’m testing out their new Mastodon iOS app Ivory. It requires a subscription to use most features; will try to update if that’s worth it.
  • One way to DM someone is to visit their Mastodon profile, click on the “…” icon, and choose the “direct message [name]” option. This will take you to what looks like the same text field you use to post to the public; the difference is that the globe icon under the field will be replaced with an @ icon (you can also use this to toggle among various options for how visible your post is to the world)
  • Moving between servers does not move your posts, so if you’re trying out different servers you may wish to decide on one before posting anything you’d like to keep accessible (or copy it before migrating or closing an account to repost elsewhere)
  • Anyone with a website they can edit can set up verification that their Mastodon profile is the one associated with that website. The link needs to be somewhere on the webpage/website you want associated with your account, and it must contain rel="me" (e.g. <a rel="me" href="https://YOUR-MASTODON-SERVER/@YOUR-MASTODON-USERNAME">my Mastodon profile</a>). Then edit your Mastodon profile to put the address of your website/page in one of your four profile fields. I’ve done this for this LiteratureGeek.com blog, as well as for my professional/CV website AmandaVisconti.com.

More to come on: how private are DMs, problems with Mastodon, list management/viewing, pinning to profile, etc.

Mastodon resources I recommend:

LinkedIn

  • linkedin.com/in/amandavisconti for sharing professional work & amplifying colleagues including student and other collaborators—let me know if you’re there so I can follow yall!

Scholars’ Lab colleague & 3D Technologies Specialist Will Rourk has been using LinkedIn as a replacement for Twitter to share his and amplify others’ work, and has been able to get his students offered jobs this way—I’d like to similarly try to connect students and other colleagues to good opportunities there. We regularly provide informal and formal career support in SLab including mock interviews, salary negotiation advice, and CV/resume reviews, so this feels like a natural extension

Scholars’ Lab colleague & Head of Student Programs Brandon Walsh has also started sharing work on LinkedIn, starting with our recent collaborative invited talk for the University of Chicago Center for Digital Scholarship (which I also blogged on this Literature Geek site).

Leaving Twitter

4/18/2023, I deleted all my likes and all my tweets except for a couple RTs covering Twitter’s recent secret removal of guidelines protecting transgender users, and a recent UVA Library tweet of Scholars’ Lab’s pre-pandemic “dog window” (why not).

Posibly more thoughts to come? I was privileged to have gotten a lot of good from Twitter over the past 14(!) years, but that always makes me think of everyone who could not safely have that same experience.

CC BY-NC by Amanda Visconti — a customization of the Lagom theme