Fundraising and Federated Social Media

It’s hard to believe that historians.social is now over a year old. In the fall of 2022 we started a texting thread that turned into a new social media server for people to talk about the past using Mastodon, an open-source platform. Since then, we’ve incorporated Clio Digital Media as a nonprofit organization to run historians.social, received grant money from Digital Scholar, a leader in creating digital tools for scholars, and managed to run our little organization while holding down our (demanding) day jobs.

We believe in the work we’re doing and we’re in it for the long haul. Each of us developed long-standing relationships and learned a great deal from the conversations we’ve had on social media over the past decade and a half. An open-source, federated social media platform like Mastodon allows us to continue in that tradition outside of the whims of corporate capitalism. Though each of us also uses other platforms, we want historians.social to remain a safe harbor.

And we want to continue that work. That’s where you come in. As we’ve said a number of times on historians.social and elsewhere online, among the key principles of Mastodon servers is that they are not ad-supported. Their principles are laid out clearly. And they are moderated by real people (in this case, us and a small group of dedicated volunteers). But of course that work requires funding.

Right now we are operating on digital shoestrings—paying a monthly fee for server space, minimal legal costs to maintain our nonprofit status and file tax returns, and a few other miscellaneous expenditures. We have some ongoing income from donations, and if you have already given, we very much thank you again. And if you haven’t, we ask you now to consider giving. It is a joy not to have your data and attention commodified. Servers cannot be funded, unfortunately, via comfortable web browsing.

If you want to help support the work we’re doing and keep historians.social going so we can continue to build it, please consider either a one-time donation or, if possible, a recurring one. Any support you provide will make it possible for us to continue this work into the future and ensure that our next texting thread can also become a reality.

Thanks for using historians.social and we very much appreciate your support.

Joe, Liz, and Karin