I've really enjoyed the space and it's already become home to a lot of amazing comm and media scholars. For anyone who's interested, Bethany Klein and I have been maintaining an opt-in
list of comm scholars on Mastodon, to make it simpler for folks to find one another. It's already at over 500 people and still growing. Feel free to look for your friends there and add yourself. People have also adopted the hashtag #commodon for posts relevant to the comm/media studies community. And accounts like @
communicationscholars@a.gup.pe and @
comm@a.gup.pe have been set up to automatically boost posts from the community.
If you've not tried Mastodon in the past and are looking for a place to start, I recommend joining via a server (a.k.a. "instance") relevant to your personal or professional interests - sciences.social, assemblag.es, hcommons.social come to mind - rather than an enormous instance like mastodon.social. You'll find more people quickly with whom you share interests if you join a relevant instance, and the instances that have become truly massive have struggled to keep pace in terms of effective moderation.
Anyhow, there are lots of ways to get involved, and while I think there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of Mastodon, for me it's also been a place for a wonderful number of great connections and thoughtful discussions. After being active there for a few weeks I don't miss Twitter in the least and I'm still able to talk to many of my favorite people from there, who've already shown up in the new space.
------------------------------
Joshua Braun
Associate Professor
U of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA
United States
------------------------------