(Re)connecting DH on Social Media

Want an overview of what folks have been doing to rebuild DH community online post-Twitter? I wrote a report on the ACH working group “(Re)connecting DH on Social Media”, which was active Fall 2023-Summer 2024 and is now sunsetting. Below, we share what we did toward supporting reconnecting community, as well as our sense of the state of DH social media (which has changed positively between July and October 2024!).

Activities

• Working plan: public GDoc with
  • suggested hashtag prompts for building conversations and amplifying community members’ work
  • Creation of Bluesky feeds per hashtag, to aid following (none of these ended up taking off)
• Original working group proposal: public GDoc with
  • explanation of current state of DH social media
  • ideas for improving and (re)connecting folks
• Quinn and Brandon ran a mutual aid effort gathering and distributing Bluesky invites, and publicizing their availability, while these were still required
• Amanda continues to maintain an up-to-date guide to Bluesky for academics
• Quinn and Amanda continued regular contributions to #DHmakes on Bluesky, where that hashtag has enjoyed an improved post-Twitter life!
  • We’re delighted to see its users and use expand, and several pieces of scholarship continue to be built on it (in addition to the past ACH 2023 session, successful mini-conference at DH 2024, peer-reviewed publication in the inaugural Journal of Korean DH (the latter documenting how changes in social media platform use have influenced DH community building, conversation, and scholarship around DH crafting and making).
  • The #DHMakes Methodz Talks series of free, public, chill maker/crafter method zoom talks are a sync community-building offshoot of the #DHMakes hashtag. Several email conversations about current social media use & analysis of what we’re seeing there, among working group

Report

We made contributions toward our goal (above), but didn’t ultimately have the energy—nor find social media platforms/community conducive—to some of the approaches we’d originally envisioned trying. In July 2024, we decided to sunset the group. Anyone is welcome to use our documentation and/or working group name to propose resuscitating the group to ACH (or to do something of your own related to DH social media, without matching what we’ve done here!).

Our assessment of these platforms and their DH use is purely anecdotal, based on personal observation and vibes. We’ve found Bluesky to be the best approximation of our previous Twitter experiences (noting those are not necessarily representative of others’ experiences on any of these platforms). In July 2024, We had found 3 of us use it regularly (daily or multiple times a week) as our primary venue for DH online connection.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon in July 2024 had seemed to have failed yet to approximate Twitter’s size of active posters and readers, frequency of conversations across users, and ability to connect to a variety of communities (e.g. by language; geographic region; personal identity; DH role; non-DH adjacent communities doing work in areas like art, tech, social justice).

We’d found Bluesky to be more active than Mastodon for our particular segments of the DH community, and more active in general; but noted that Mastodon seems to maybe be preferred by other segments such as European DHers and research software engineers.

In October 2024, we’ve seen a large influx of DHy Bluesky users as Twitter/X continued to disintegrate and become an explicit machine for hate and fascist lies. Bluesky now feels similar to “early DH Twitter” (e.g. 2009-2015) to at least one of our working group. Advances in Bluesky features and in bridging between Bluesky and Mastodon are growing the user community.

We’re interested to see what happens with Discord (less accessible as finding and being invited to servers is harder; live chat rather than message posting format) and Threads (has had a more Instagram-y “non-academic use by academics” vibe so far; federation allowing people to read across various platforms including Threads may help?). In July 2024, a few of us had also noticed turning more often to group direct messages on Slacks that we would have put on Twitter DMs or Twitter in the past, including via the Digital Humanities Slack (free platform, so doesn’t keep all messages readable forever) and ACH Exec’s internal private Slack. In October 2024, Bluesky has had individual DMs for a while now and are starting to see use, but the lack of group DMs is an issue.

The group didn’t have bandwidth to continue with formal async or sync work, we are proactively sunsetting so that we can document our work and allow others to build on it or pick it up, rather than letting it linger as something we still semi-committed to doing but aren’t.

Working group members

And their social media handles: