Andy Jackson is a Preservation Registries Technical Architect at the Digital Preservation Coalition
The digital preservation community has known for many years that the volatile world of social media platforms represented a significant risk to digital history. It was added to the Bit List in 2019 and it hasn’t eased since. In truth, it’s worse now, because it’s no longer just about losing our content. It’s about losing our connections. Our communities.
The loss of the once-vibrant #DigiPres community on Twitter has been lamented loudly and widely. And as ‘X’ continues its indecent descent, the poor moderation and new barriers to access mean staying there seems increasingly untenable. Many digital preservation community members no longer feel welcome there, and a growing number of organisations are choosing to minimise their engagement on X or leave the platform altogether (like JISC).
Of course we’re on LinkedIn, Facebook & Instagram, which works fine for more official output. But it’s all a bit, you know, corporate. It doesn’t feel very #DigiPres.
So where should we go?
Mastodon!
From the perspective of digital preservation, there’s a lot to like about Mastodon. A big part of a good digital preservation strategy involves avoiding systems with single points of failure, and picking ones that keep your options as open as possible in case you do need to change tack. As an open and federated platform, choosing Mastodon means you can host your own server or use an existing provider, and move across the Fediverse if you need to.
But this also raises a problem…
Which Mastodon?
There are so many to choose from, and the communities on different servers can be very different from each other. Did we need to start afresh and make a new place to be?
Fortunately not!
For many years now, long preceding the current kerfuffles, there has been a digipres.club to turn to. The name and idea came from Ethan Gates, but as you can read in his blog introducing digipres.club in 2018, the first implementation didn’t last very long. Fortunately, Joshua Ng loved the idea and offered to run the service, overseeing and encouraging its initial adoption by those looking for an alternative to Twitter. Since then, Misty De Méo has joined as co-administrator and co-moderator, and helped manage and migrate the system to keep up with technological changes and with the growth in both users and usage.
You can find them there as @misty and @joshuatj, along with the many DPC staff and #DigiPres community members who are already on board!
Steady Now
It’s important to realise this is a volunteer-run and moderated community service. We don’t want to barge in and bring along a whole load of new people without taking some steps to support the service. There are costs here that scale with users and usage. We need to take care.
So, in an attempt to ease the burden, the DPC has joined the existing group of sponsors and supporters who contribute to the running costs through Patreon. We’re going to start tooting (not tweeting!) officially from there from now, and we’d like to encourage more of the #DigiPres community to come on board, including financially supporting the service if you can.
Join us in the digipres.club!
To join up, go to the sign-up page and fill out the form. There’s a section where you add a little bit of information about yourself so the moderators know you are really here for the #DigiPres! The clearer your connection to the world of digital preservation is, the quicker and easier it will be for the moderators to approve.
Again, this is a volunteer-based community service, so be patient and be kind! Take the time to read the about page, which covers all sorts of useful things including what behaviour is encouraged and what is unwelcome.
There’s also lots of good advice out there, like this ‘official’ guide to joining Mastodon, which you can use to familiarise yourself with the basics.
Be yourself
Once your account is set up, the first thing we recommend you do is edit your profile so people can be sure the you you are being is the you they used to know. Some good ways to do this are:
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Re-using the username and avatar that you use or used elsewhere.
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Adding a little biographical information.
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Adding links from your new account to your other social media accounts and websites.
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Adding links from your other accounts back to digipres.club. This can even be used to more formally verify who you are.
Once it’s clear who you are, you can start exploring and following folks. You could start with the folks using the #DigiPres hash tag or take a look at the whole digipres.club ‘local’ timeline! And we’ll be there as @dpc_chat too.
Need more help? Come to the Webinar!
There’s more to talk about! There’s some new terminology to get used to (e.g. moving to toots and tooting). It can be tricky to understand how the visibility of comments works across the federated network. There are too many apps to choose from! What’s a ‘Content Warning’ and when should you use them? Following people on other servers is a bit clumsy. Search works a bit differently than you might expect.
But don’t worry, we’re here to help! If you hit problems or have questions, please use our other social channels to get in touch and we’ll do our best to get you connected.
We’re also planning to run a webinar for DPC Members in a few weeks time, where we’ll demonstrate how things work and have “old hands” on hand to answer your questions. Keep an eye on digipres.club or dpconline.org/events for details!
In the meantime, have a go at getting set up, explore what’s there, and support the Patreon if you can.
See you in the Fediverse!