social networks

Social networks are valuable to reach out to many researchers, in addition to our website or our newsletter. Our Linktree lists all our available social network profiles. Unfortunately, the interests of privately owned social networks do not align well with an inclusive and diverse academic community (Brembs et al, 2023) and pushed us to the following policy.

Our approach is based on two principles:

1. ensuring that our events can be advertised widely, including on potentially unethical platforms where a significant share of the animal behaviour community is active;

2. developing and promoting alternative ethical social network platforms for the animal behaviour community.

Our solution:

Following the arguments introduced in Brembs et al, 2023, we set Mastodon as our main social network, while other platforms can be considered as mirrors where our activities can be followed. Mastodon is a decentralised social network platform that allows academics to self-organise while avoiding corporate capture.

To further develop the animal behaviour community on Mastodon, we maintain the Animal behaviour on Mastodon directory, that lists animal behaviour researchers active on Mastodon, facilitating the build-up of an active and relevant timeline when migrating to Mastodon. This directory belongs to the Academics on Mastodon initiative, a collection of lists of academics from multiple fields on Mastodon. Do not hesitate to follow the guidelines to enlist in the directory and help us in building an ethical social platform for animal behaviour researchers!

If you are new to Mastodon and do not really know how to proceed from here, there are guides such as this one to help you start. As for the choice of instance, we, at Animal Behaviour Live, trusted the ecoevo.social instance, initiated by Dr Alexis Simon, which has explicitly inclusive moderation rules and is transparently funded by the ecoevo community.