On The Carpentries and Twitter

To The Carpentries Community:

Twitter has been of great use to The Carpentries as a platform. It has enabled us to connect with our community, welcome new people and groups to our community, and engage in and facilitate conversations. We have spent a great amount of time and effort to bolster our presence on the platform with these purposes in mind.

That is why we have been distressed by the changes that have taken place or are planned to take place at the platform. Planned changes like less content moderation, removing resources and personnel from critical teams dedicated to safety, preventing misinformation, and communications, make the platform worse and demonstrably less safe and inviting. Additional planned changes around increased monetization at the platform will make the platform less accessible as well.

For the time being, while we will continue to post on Twitter to ensure that we are connecting with as much of our community as possible, we will also be doing the following:

• creating an account on Mastodon which has emerged as a popular open source alternative to Twitter, particularly amongst the groups that are vital to our community. To learn more about Mastodon, please consult this BBC article. In our case, we will be crossposting to both platforms, but will dedicate efforts to bolster our community there.

• more heavily focusing our communication efforts on our other platforms such as Slack and through our biweekly newsletter, Carpentries Clippings. You can sign up for those at carpentries.org/connect

• continuing to monitor changes at Twitter in conjunction with internal discussions about whether our presence on the platform will continue.

Our goal at all times is to ensure that our community is supported and can discuss data, open science, and community in an inclusive and accessible way.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to connect with us at community@carpentries.org.