Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2023, the tone and the user experience on the site have been constantly declining, resulting in an anti-science atmosphere and with considerably reduced reach for our own content that we want to share within, and beyond, our community. We, the Leibniz PostDoc Network steering committee, have therefore decided that from now on we will leave X, as it is now called, and continue to communicate on alternative social media platforms. In case you missed it, more than 60 German academic institutions departed X, a day after Musk’s talk with AfD head Alice Weidel, earlier this month. The coordinated move of so many academic institutions was covered widely in German news media, and even made international news. Two days later our biggest research funding body in Germany, the DFG, also left X. As many other scientists globally have also been leaving the platform during the past months, we decided to join this “eXit”-movement. But where do we go?
A German initiative is pushing for German universities to make Mastodon, or more broadly the Fediverse, their main communication plattform, see this blogpost on wikimedia.de (in German). But for now it seems that BlueSky is the main replacement service for that part of academic and science communication that used to be on Twitter during the past decade. A new Nature poll confirms this impression. Nevertheless, we decided to create accounts on both aforementioned platforms. Hence you can now follow us on Bluesky and on Mastodon. We remain at LinkedIn, where, notably, our reach has considerably grown since Elon Musk’s X takeover, suggesting that many people also use this platform as a replacement for the earlier academic Twitter. Having to deal with three social media platforms now, rather than with two as we did the last couple of years, means more work for us, who all do this on a voluntary base beside our day jobs in the Leibniz research institutes. However, we think that this is the best way to represent, and to connect with, our amazing, diverse and wonderful early career researcher community.
If you are still on X/Twitter, and consider leaving, we recommend the website helloquitx.com, set up by a group of French academics, that will help you make a smooth transition to the new platform(s).
Christian Nehls and Gregor Kalinkat, on behalf of the Leibniz PostDoc Network steering committee.
