How to move to Mastodon for #TeamMassSpec and other science social media!

(Original image, believe it or not). 

So...Twitter is not getting better. It is doing the opposite of doing better....

I GET SO MUCH OF MY CONTENT FROM TWITTER! Where to next??

Introducing Mastodon Social. Nope, I didn't know about it either! 

What if something was sort of like Twitter but was decentralized so that no one could buy it yet and there weren't ads? That's what it's like.

It isn't, however, as easy as Twitter, but if you're here you are a scientist or really really strange. In either case you are probably smart enough to sort it out! 

I, however, needed a tutorial. Or three. 

#TeamMassSpec to the rescue! 

Where I started was this Github which has some great tips from some dude as he was getting set up, and it largely draws from a crazy awesome resource that Cris Lapthorn set up.

If you're on the Twitter, here is a link to a Tweet from Cris. 

Check out how cool this is: if you go to this survey that Cris set up and enter your details after you're set up on Mastodon it will add you to this big #TeamMassSpec google sheet, which you can download as a CSV file. 

Then when you get into your Mastodon account you can go to your personal profile and upload that CSV (you do have to delete the first line of that CSV file).

VIOLIN! You now have a whole bunch of cool people that you're linked to through the social media stuff so now you can see what they think is important. As I'm typing this now it looks like you can download the info from like 75 people there. 

You do have to pick a server. I went with genomic.social because that sounded fancy, but it isn't a big deal which one you set up under. You can swap it later.