mastodon 4.7.3This is the account for the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers, an international group of scholars studying non-corporate social media.
Account operated by @rwg@aoir.social
We just held another Alternative Social Media Reading Group meeting, this time discussing Hwang et al's fantastic paper, "Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19653
Looking forward to adding this to our library!
The first post of 2026 on the Alternative Social Media Researchers Blog is live! It's by @jjsylvia@mastodon.social and it presents a syllabus of a course in social media ethics. The course uses a classroom instance of Mastodon to work through ethical issues in digital media.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2026/01/12/teaching-mastodon.html
Replies to this post will appear as comments on the blog.
#Mastodon #pedagogy #alternativeSocialMedia
Our latest blogpost is "Blacksky: Exemplary Alternative Social Media":
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2026/03/08/blacksky.html
A short note about #Blacksky as a social and technical achievement -- a fascinating form of alternative social media.
The latest blog posts from the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers is live! It's a rundown of some of the newest items we've added to our academic bibliography:
https://socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/08/01/new-bib-items.html
The items include analyses of alt-tech and a study of the incomplete Twitter/Mastodon migration.
A member of the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers, Karen Frost-Arnold, is helping to organize a conference called "Digital Decolonization and Digital Justice," to be held at the U of Johannesburg in August. The CFP is here:
#academicchatter #CFPs #digitalDecolonization #DigitalJustice
There's a new Alternative Social Media researcher interview! This time it's with @kfrostarnold@aoir.social, who is philosopher studying social epistemology.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/07/14/frost-arnold.html
The Alternative Social Media researchers blog has a new post! This one's from @jat23@aoir.social, and it is a reflection on ideas from #HOPE16 and how they apply to alternative social media research.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/09/01/hope-and-asm.html
#alternativeSocialMedia #academicchatter
[Replies to this post will appear as comments on the blog]
A new post up on the Alternative Social Media Researchers blog! This one is making a strong claim: PeerSon was the first alternative social media system.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/10/10/peerson.html
The post is based on a research collaboration between @rra@post.lurk.org and @rwg@aoir.social.
There's a new Researcher Interview at the Alternative Social Media blog!
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/10/02/tkacz.html
In this interview, Nate Tkacz talks with Blake Hallinan about a new paper, "Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink," which is about the movement away from Twitter towards Mastodon in late 2022/early 2023.
The latest Alternative Social Media blog post is about a couple new items we have in our bibliography. There's a new special issue of the Internet Policy Review, and two of the articles focus on governance on the fediverse.
https://socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/04/11/new-items.html
The lastest ASM Researcher Network interview is live! It's with Ashwin Nagappa of QUT, who is about to embark on an exciting two-year postdoc project! Ashwin talks about that project, as well as researching alt-right platforms and the problems of cryptocurrencies in alternative social media.
https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/04/27/nagappa.html
Latest ASM Researchers blog post is about two new research articles in the bibliography:
https://socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/03/28/two-new-items-bib.html
Both of these academic studies focus on the movement of people from Twitter to systems like Mastodon. One focuses on journalists, the other focuses on the different moral values of both networks.
#academicchatter #research #Twitter #Mastodon #journalism #alternativeSocialMedia
