Decentralized social media for scientists: Big Brother doesn't have to boss you around

The resilience of networks, such as the electrical grid or communication networks, requires to avoid bottleneck nodes whose failure compromises the whole network. This is true of the physical infrastructure, but also of the software and governance architecture of networks. Historically, the world wide web has developed as a decentralised network, defined by a communication protocol, but made of independently hosted websites connected by hyperlinks. Social media such as Twitter, however, have developed under a centralised governance, making their users dependent on central decisions. The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has brought increased interest for WWW-like alternatives, which are made of a myriad of independently-run but interconnected services. The Fediverse is the global network that all these services form together. In this talk, I will give both a global perspective on the organisation of this decentralised network and give a flavour of what a user may experience when using it, with an attention on the interests of a scientific researcher. This talk is not be about why it matters but rather showing what the differences are, for you to decide what is best to do or not to do. Disclaimer : these contents do not correspond to my research field, and are merely the perception of an interested scientist of those social media. A few links: example of instances Generalist mastodon instances: https://mastodon.social : largest, 300k users https://piaille.fr : large French instance https://pouet.chapril.org : smaller, managed by free software nonprofit l'April Science oriented ones, managed by volunteers: https://mathstodon.xyz : with \LaTeX support https://fediscience.org : large-ish, registration limited to "researchers currently publishing in scientific journals" (or expecting to, case-by-case acceptability decisions) https://sciences.re : intended for the French-speaking higher education and research community https://scicomm.xyz : a small instance ran by volunteers Science, institutional https://biologists.social : by UK learned society co of biologists, everyone welcome though. https://universites.social : only for people with an eduGAIN account, so staff of higher education/research in France. We can chat about it... on the Fediverse : @[email protected]