A while back, I was once again browsing my personal corner of the internet after work. These days, this mainly involves two Mastodon accounts—an anonymous private one and an “official” one on the fedihum server, which I use under my real name and therefore occasionally for professional purposes as well.
(The Mastodon instance at www.fedihum.org has been operated by the DHd since 2022 and is intended to serve the German-speaking digital humanities community as a platform for digital academic communication, replacing Elon Musk’s Twitter, now known as X. https://digitalhumanities.de/2022/11/14/dhd-verband-initiiert-mit-fedihum-org-neue-mastodon-instanz-fuer-alle-digital-humanities-aficionados/)
Mastodon
On Mastodon, I follow a constantly updated list of interesting people or (professionally) relevant organizations, and I think it’s wonderful! No algorithms, no ads—only people shape this space. (The WiNoDa Knowledge Lab also has an account—feel free to follow us at https://nfdi.social/@winoda!)
Of course, building and maintaining this network takes a bit of time and effort—you should read your timeline fairly regularly, identify interesting people, organizations, or hashtags, and follow them. You can quietly read along or actively participate with replies, re-toots, quoots, or even (gasp!) your own toots. (Yeah, yeah, I know, the “tooting” of the Mastodons sounds silly, but it’s no sillier than the “tweeting” of the Twitterati.)
If you do all of this, you’ll be—in my opinion—richly rewarded with all sorts of interesting links to publications, events, course offerings, or even just information on where to find the best coffee at a conference.
There are now also “starter packs”—similar to those on Bluesky, which works in a similar way but is commercially centralized—so you can find “your” people with just a few clicks. (My colleague Jannis Gomer, for example, has already created several starter packs for the WiNoDa community: https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/?q=winoda&language=&order_by=popular_day.)
Fediverse
But Mastodon isn’t the only service in the so-called Fediverse — the network of various independent social media platforms linked via the ActivityPub protocol.
So if microblogging on Mastodon isn’t your thing: there are services in the Fediverse that are analogous to almost all the familiar platforms from the “real” internet (e.g., PeerTube for videos, Pixelfed for photos, Friendica instead of Facebook, Lemmy instead of Reddit, Loops for short videos, Bookwyrm, and many more) – and they can all “federate” with one another, so that in my feed I can see everything posted by the channels I follow or published with the corresponding hashtags (photos, videos, blog posts).
In addition, I’ve even subscribed to an old-fashioned RSS feed, such as the one for the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab Journal blog. (All blog posts automatically appear under my name in my feed.)
The great advantage—and at the same time the biggest drawback—of the wonderful Fediverse is its decentralization: there is no single platform, but rather countless interconnected servers. So where is the “entrance”? Where do you sign up? Which server instance should you choose, and what are the differences?
It’s therefore a real stroke of luck when institutions (e.g., KIT Karlsruhe or the University of Innsbruck) or professional associations (e.g., the aforementioned DHd—Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries—or the Dutch IT Cooperative for Education and Research, SURF) set up their own Mastodon instances, so that us average users don’t have to worry about the technical details.
But given the many different ways to connect in the Fediverse—why do almost all academic associations or institutions choose a Mastodon server, of all things, for their communities?
For one thing, because it offers what is likely the most successful implementation of the ActivityPub protocol—and for another, because, following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the new servers were intended to serve as a direct replacement for the dismantled “Science Twitter.”
Apparently, the developers of Bonfire also realized that potential is being wasted here. Bonfire isn’t a platform or an “app,” but rather a modular framework for building digital community spaces. Possible features include feeds (that interact with or federate with Mastodon, etc.), groups, user circles, and moderation tools… and if something is missing, you can develop it (or have it developed). (So far, Bonfire development seems to have been funded through crowdfunding: https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community#/section/project-story)
So there’s no fixed set of features for Bonfire—instead, it’s based on a modular approach that anyone can customize and host on their own server. That is, if you have the technical skills, a server, and the time.
Open Science Network
This is where the initiators of the (planned) Open Science Network saw their opportunity. The Open Science Network aims to serve as a Bonfire-based platform for open academic discourse – including ORCID integration for user profiles.
That sounded exciting, so I asked around a bit on Mastodon, and one of the initiators kindly agreed to tell me (and the others involved in the discussion who had time) a little more about it.
So the three of us (Jorge Saturno (https://mastodon.pub.solar/@jorgeluis), Henrik Schönemann (https://fedihum.org/@lavaeolus) and I (https://fedihum.org/@AvSchroeder)) met after work in a Jitsi room and talked about the background, benefits, obstacles, and challenges of the project.
Here’s what I took away from that conversation:
The initiative stems from the desire to network online without making one’s professional networks dependent on a commercial platform. After all, these platforms can hold personal networks hostage at any time and change the rules of the game—as has happened with Twitter, among others. The vision is a digital network of researchers—free of advertising and algorithms—that instead provides optimal support for the community’s very specific needs, such as the ORCID integration that has already been implemented. This integration not only serves as authentication but can also directly display the publication list in the profile. Plans also include the ability to publish preprints and conduct open reviews. A workflow is also being considered that would automatically assign a DOI to completed discussions and publish them on Zenodo (though questions still need to be clarified regarding consent, costs, and what is actually worthy of publication). And, of course, the community will be explicitly involved in the development, customization, and integration of additional features and interfaces based on its own needs.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a ‘proper’ instance yet – but you can get a first impression here: https://sandbox.openscience.network/ And it seems that discussions are already underway with several institutions to see if they would like to set up a Bonfire instance with an ‘Open Science’ focus as a pilot scheme.
Much of our discussion centres on who the potential hosts might be. Universities and research institutions are obvious candidates – just as they popularised email in the 1990s by simply providing email addresses to all enrolled students and teaching staff, they could now also act as multipliers – with members of their own institution as ‘automatic’ members, but with the option to connect to or federate with other servers.
Another option would be the Academic Societies. This would have the advantage of a good fit in terms of content – and if you were to change universities, you as a user would not need to migrate your profile, as people tend to change disciplines less frequently than their affiliation.
If one were to view such a network as a national or even international infrastructure, the NFDI (which already operates a Mastodon instance) or even the EOSC could also be considered.
And, of course, combinations of all of these, with a variety of entry points, because, as mentioned, anyone can and is allowed to set up their own Bonfire instance, which would then federate with the other instances.
However, contrary to the decentralised approach – which is, in itself, laudable and often defended in the Fediverse as if it were a sacred dogma – the creation of a dedicated, centralised platform also offers advantages (in my personal opinion):
It could serve as a central entry point, which would make onboarding much easier – particularly for reaching people who are not yet part of the Fediverse, which is often perceived as complicated and fragmented. It could also offer all those ‘homeless’ project researchers an easily accessible, permanent home.
This could be funded, for example, through institutional memberships, similar to the Open Science Framework (OSF) — which, incidentally, would also be an interesting integration/interface for OSN alongside Zotero — or ORCID or other centralised services. The actual hosting, server administration and so on could then be outsourced to an external service provider, without placing too great a burden on institutional departments.
That was an interesting conversation, and I wouldn’t have had it without Mastodon and the people in the Fediverse. I’m really keen to see how the Open Science Network develops. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on it.
References and further reading:
https://www.fedihum.org
https://digitalhumanities.de/
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
good short explainer: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/f924e846c24ec7ed82d6d554a7e7c9a8
good introduction: https://jointhefediverse.net/?lang=en-us
https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/?q=winoda&language=&order_by=popular_day
https://www.kit.edu/kit/202507-kit-launcht-eigene-mastodon-instanz.php
https://www.uibk.ac.at/de/fediverse/mastodon/
https://www.surf.nl/en/about-the-mastodon-pilot
https://bonfirenetworks.org/
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/bonfires-new-software-lets-users-build-their-own-social-communities-free-from-platform-control/
https://openscience.network/
https://orcid.org/
https://info.orcid.org/de/vendors-and-service-providers/orcid-certified-service-providers-list/
https://sandbox.openscience.network/
https://osf.io/
https://www.zotero.org/
As an academic staff at the DAI, my main responsibility for WiNoDa lies in the creation of self-study courses on discipline-specific data literacy.
Hands-on and interactive – my goal is: less technical jargon, more “aha” moments.
Because we are all working with data!