I am using this post to keep track of a few things.
I have joined Mastodon (https://nerdculture.de/web/@liamdelaney2020). I am still very wobbly legged using it. Though I have made progress. I have figured out mostly how to find and follow people. There are a lot of psychologists on the platform, and the open-science community in particular seems to have made a co-ordinated move there. I am a bit worried personally about how to work with the norms of the local groups. I joined a server called nerd-culture simply because I liked the name and it was available. I am worried about whether I am intruding. It will take some time to figure it out but it is definitely worth exploring and I could easily see it becoming a replacement for twitter for scientific communities. In general the role of the individual servers on Mastodon is something that will take a lot of time for non-tech folks like me to get a strong sense of. Linkedin also clearly is a substitute for job announcements, events, etc., and in many ways might be better for that type of thing than twitter.
One thing that many people, including me, have realised is that google news is a reasonable replacement for the doom-scrolling function of twitter. If you want to spend a few minutes getting bombarded with info about topics or places of interests, you can quite easily set up google news to do that. It doesn't have the personalised edge of a twitter feed but it does remove the worry of losing out on being informed. I maintain subscriptions to a few national newspapers and have access to others through the university, and in general still like to buy a broadsheet newspaper. The events with twitter have made me think again about the issue of how much one should pay for media and how to spread across different types.
I would be interested to hear more about how universities, public bodies, charities, etc., are responding to the events at twitter. There have obviously been many reports of advertisers getting jittery. It doesn't seem credible for bodies like universities to continue to post in an official capacity on twitter at a time where there is no certainty at all what is going to happen to content moderation, controls on hate spread, control on undue influence from the owner etc., At the very least, public bodies should be ready to elaborate their rationale for remaining on the platform. Universities will be reluctant, for good reasons, to be dragged into ideological arguments but to continue to post is in itself a position and one that potentially debases the institutions. This will likely come to a head soon anyway if they are being asked to pay to keep accounts verified. Even if the payments will be small it will create a decision point in each institution and one where mounting disquiet might come to the fore.
Links:
Irish Times article on alternatives to Twitter
One of the most useful guides to Mastodon from Daniella Navarro
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