Oh Twitter, oh Elon, what a curfuffle. Since I’m not actively teaching, I thought I could just sidestep the question of where to migrate my connections on Twitter.

But along came a post by a blogher and academic colleague, Kim Pearson, who I met years ago. Kim’s post about using a Mastodon instance to create an open-source pro-democracy social media network was a call to action for me.

Whether I am considering City Bureau, Block Club Chicago, and other innovative journalism start-ups that are working with the “people formerly known as audience” and also how progressive philanthropy can move beyond its paternalistic roots, the idea of an open-source pro-democracy social media network is key.

This is what I expected Twitter to be, though I was naive about lots of the computational underpinnings of social networks. Anyway, this is notice that I’ve signed up for Fossodon, an instance of Mastodon, and I’m going to move over there and try it out. More to come…