jonny (good kind) on Nostr: I think academics have an obligation as being some of the few groups that have public ...

I think academics have an obligation as being some of the few groups that have public funding not tied to profit to use those resources for the public good. By committing to the fediverse and open source communication mediums, we can not only make mediums that directly meet our needs while making our work accessible and available to people outside the ivory tower, but help improve those mediums for everyone.

Academics have a long history of being complicit in oppressive systems, and digital communication is no exception - the prevailing publishing regime not only extracts public resources that could be used for public benefit, but powers surveillance systems that are used for repression and control like algorithmic policing, border enforcement, and so on. Twitter should have been a lesson: if we dont control the means of communication, all we are doing is creating a valuable target to be acquired and allow our need to communicate to be turned into an instrument of extraction and control.

It's not just the features of the fedi (though it gives us the chance to directly improve those too in a way that even other ostensibly federated technologies like bsky/atproto don't), but the stark ethical and political reality of academic communication - it's more important than the posts.