The Fediverse bot FediFollows published a list of recommended geospatial Fediverse accounts. The list features, among others, geospatial conferences, news channels, blogs, software, organizations, government bodies, geospatial professionals, OSM-related accounts, and discussion groups.
You can follow these accounts from any Fediverse instance, for example, from a Mastodon account, or you can consume them via RSS1: Appending .rss to the URL of any Fediverse account yields an RSS feed. For example, for the Spatialists account:
- the Mastodon account URL is https://mapstodon.space/@spatialists
- the corresponding RSS feed is at https://mapstodon.space/@spatialists.rss
Why does this matter? — Three years2 after the implosion of their community on Twitter, part of the geospatial industry is still feeling phantom pain: It certainly feels like there is no equivalent to Twitter-of-the-2010s for connecting and sharing knowledge and opinions on geospatial topics.3 There is some hope, the Fediverse may fill part of this void.
Besides the RSS feed and the newsletter, this site also uses LinkedIn and the Fediverse (Mastodon) to broadcast its news.
Footnotes
“Rich Site Summary”, “Really Simple Syndication”, and/or “RDF Site Summary”, over time. This site hosts a quick intro.↩︎
Give or take.↩︎
Sure, there are: Threads, Bluesky, Slack, Discord, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. But none of these has the culture and mechanisms Twitter had. All have essentially the same frail business model and lopsided incentives, though.↩︎