Work in progress: The social media landscape has changed dramatically in the past several years.1 There is every reason to get off our previous favorites, and there is no reason to avoid doing so because there are good alternatives now that share increasing intercompatability. I am collecting links here to help those who have not yet made the transition, or who have perhaps not yet even posted on social media or their own blog. I am including links about blogging because that too has been changing.

My Experiences

Others’ Experiences

  • From Twitter to Mastodon – SocProf’s Fediblog, January 15, 2023. How one sociologist used Twitter for their professional life and how they then made the transition to the Fediverse.
  • POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world by Molly White – “A simple technique offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party platforms.”

IndieWeb

  • IndieWeb – Read the first part of the front page for the core ideas. Quit reading when it gets too technical, but try to retain the ethos.
  • Indie Microblogging by Manton Reece – This ebook in HTML is partly about microblogging and its history, including the various platforms, such as the old Twitter. It is also a rumination on what had gone wrong and what could be done better. Finally, it is a manifesto for such a project from an indie web perspective. The result was Micro.blog. Parts of the book are suitable for the general reader. Other parts might be more technical than you want or too specific to Micro.blog, which has changed anyway.

Noncommercial Academic Blogging Platforms

  • Hypotheses – “A platform by OpenEdition for humanities and social sciences research blogs.” This WordPress-based platform is European based and multilingual. It is both a place for blogging and a portal of academic blogs.
    • One must apply to run a blog with a specific topical focus. These can be individual or group blogs.
    • You cannot use your own domain name. We initially ran History of Knowledge on WordPress.com for more flexibility with extensions and shortcodes, but the entshittification of recent years has made Hypotheses a much better option. I suspect, too, that it’s been moved so that it survives any change in priorities when a new director comes in. The old domain historyofknowledge.net has been replaced by historyofknowledge.hypotheses.org
  • Knowledge Commons
    • Once known as Humanities Commons, they have rebranded as a “network for knowledge creators across the disciplines. Discover the latest open-access scholarship and teaching materials, make interdisciplinary connections, build a WordPress website, and increase the impact of your work by sharing it in the repository.”
    • They encourage members to use as many blogs as they need for their scholarly work. I will likely turn here the next time I need to put together a course website. Groups blogs are also possible.
    • Knowledge Commons also runs a Mastodon server, hcommons.social.

Last updated: February 1, 2025

  1. There have been several negative factors driving this trend. First, there has been growing dissatisfaction with the entshittification of social media, which has fed and fed on the corporate capture of wide swathes of the internet. Second, besides making good products bad, they use algorithms to generate engagement of the type that has helped Orange Man and that—more ominously—Rocket Bro has leveraged to gain access to the inner orange circle. Third, engagement and abuse associated with elections has raised exposed deep weaknesses in our information environment, not to mention basic safety and moderation on social media. Can it really just be left to the whims of this billionaire or that? ↩︎