Should Repositories Participate in the Fediverse?

Presentation for OR2024 making the case that repositories could play a part in the "fediverse" of distributed social applications

1. Paul Walk
Director & Founder, Antleaf
Email: [email protected] www.antleaf.com
Should repositories participate in the
Fediverse?
Presentation to Open Repositories 2024

2. Yes!

3. First of all...
•Why care about social networks, let alone the next generation "Fediverse"?
•Social engagement and institutional repositories: a case study
Susan Boulton, https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.504#B7
•Griffith Research Online (GRO) "...deliberately utilized open access (OA)
content in [the repository] to support a small social media campaign".
•the 15 featured articles were accessed close to 500 times
•the most popular article was accessed 112 times
•the most popular tweet from @GriffithLibrary [Twitter] account posted on
24 April 2018 received 16.8k ‘impressions’.
•"...to proactively find opportunities to demonstrate the important role our
repositories play in research dissemination and community reach"

4. What is "The Fediverse"?
•According to Wikipedia:
•The fediverse (a portmanteau of
"federation" and "universe") is an
ensemble of social networks
which can communicate with each
other, while remaining
independent platforms.
•The important points:
•decentralised
•independently managed/governed
systems

5. Academic social networks
•Mastodon over Mammon: towards publicly owned scholarly knowledge
Björn Brembs , Adrian Lenardic , Peter Murray-Rust , Leslie Chan and Dasapta Erwin Irawan
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.230207
•Proposes a federated scholarly information network, with "green" repositories
playing a vital role

6. Mastodon
Following changes in the "management" of Twitter in 2022:
At the start of 2022 Mastodon had 2.7 million registered users and 294,000
monthly active users. By the end of the year, that had grown to 5.8 million
registered users and 1.8 million monthly active users.
https://musically.com/2023/10/03/twitter-flight-helped-mastodon-grow-to-1-8m-active-users-in-2022/
These are the "related posts" at the bottom of an article The fediverse is an
opportunity learned societies can’t ignore by Bjorn Brembs
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/11/30/the-fediverse-is-an-opportunity-learned-societies-cant-ignore/

7. Academic Mastodon servers

8. ActivityPub
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

9. COAR Notify
•Repositories are already
starting to adopt COAR Notify
•COAR Notify uses the same
standards which underpin
ActivityPub
•COAR Notify is all about
positioning repositories as
vital components in a
decentralised infrastructure
•This idea is becoming
mainstream with the
Fediverse!
https://notify.coar-repositories.org/

10. Conclusions
•Repositories should be "social-network" friendly
•They should probably continue to support the established "monolithic" systems
(e.g. Twitter) for the time being...
•They should recognise that distributed social networks (using ActivityPub) are
growing - and are especially popular with many academics

11. Should repositories
participate in the Fediverse?

12. Yes!

13. Paul Walk
Director & Founder, Antleaf
Email: [email protected] www.antleaf.com
Thank you!