I wanted to follow someone on scholar.social but could not as I happen to be on qoto.org --- random server I picked. So I reached out to the moderators of both. Both were kind and quick to respond. What I learned might be relevant for other academics:
Scholar.social is on the more restrictive end of what they accept, and qoto.org perhaps on the other end, enough so for scholar.social to have blocked qoto. Scholar.social blocks many other servers, by their own admission, but only qoto among those catering to academics.
My conclusion, you might want to avoid both, if you don't want to be blocked from following people on either server.
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@lcparra Scholar has a very small population (1/30th that of QOTO) and highly violent as radicalized (see attached as an example of a post the admin of scholar specifically condoned and would not suspend until after the FBI were called by several users).
QOTO is moderate in its moderation policies. We are one of the more moderated servers and have strict rules against most bad behavior as our ToC clearly states
Moreover so far QOTO is the only instance in the UFoI, and has one of the largest peer counts (most federated) of scholastic instances.
To recommend not joining QOTO simply because of a super small radicalized instance blocking us is a pretty silly move since you'll find you can see **far** fewer servers from most other instances.
We also have subscriptions, so you can just subscribe to users there if you REALLY want to see content, something you cant do from any other instance.
Finally, consider our local timeline, which should be most of your decision in picking a server. I will leave that up to you to explore.
@lcparra I've found qoto.org to be quite welcoming. Scholar.social, too darn restrictive.With scholar.social, I say "Good riddance!" I have to admit that I was quite disappointed with Scholar.social. I was glad to move on to a different instance.
🙂
@lcparra You might look at hcommons.social if you want to find a really nice group of academics. Or try mas.to or mstdn.social, or mastodon.education. Hey, here's a list: https://www.mguhlin.org/2022/11/education-friendly-mastodon-instances.html
@lcparra I’m rather coming to the conclusion that no place is guaranteed to be safe if you want to follow people on scholar.social. They are really amazing trigger-happy! Which is their right, of course, but it seems like bad behavior to me.