Like many people, I have been having a look at Mastodon for use and research. As I am currently updating my labs for next term, I thought that I’d have a slightly deeper look using R (the labs’ language) and the rtoot package. It is only a sketch but the existing work seems promising for future exploration of its ecology and how it is different from the more familiar Twitter.
I can see how technically one explores it but it is the culture that needs to be discovered and understood for future teaching. At the moment, we live in interesting times for digital methods and platforms. Rtweet’s latest update had some interesting challenges for our code (fixed by reverting to the previous version) and will there be a Twitter soon? Either way, it is time to update skills and techniques for new challenges.
I posted an issue with the rtoot team today that was fixed really quickly and the work around posted suggested ways of doing something. (On a side note, it was great as it taught me a bit more about finding lists of Mastodon instances and I ended up on Mastodon instances.)
Before I get too excited, must finish the thesis.
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