I’ve written a piece for Research Professional. It’s currently behind a paywall but they’ve promised me this will be removed in a few days:
While there is a real potential for a more sustainable social infrastructure for scholarship through platforms like Mastodon, it will require a careful approach that looks beyond the existing horizon of research communications. Unfortunately, the tendency to regard social media as a trivial feature of academic life means such leadership has long been lacking.
In its absence, academics have been driven into the arms of corporate platforms not fit for purpose and encouraged to think narrowly in terms of their individual careers rather than the communal purposes being served by digital engagement within the sector. Unless universities, research councils and learned societies begin to intervene in these spaces in a strategic manner, it is likely we will see this dynamic repeated. And if the critical mass of academics that coalesced on Twitter during the 2010s begins to disperse across a range of platforms then the communications infrastructure of the sector will be left in an even worse place than it is at present.
Mark Carrigan 