Some thinking aloud about what’s happening on social media in my world, I hope you don’t mind.
![Mathstodon page showing post by @peterrowlett with text "Nice to see hashtags like #MTBoS #ITeachMath starting to appear here. Are we going to do #tmwyk?"](https://aperiodical.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/mathstodon-peterrowlett-1024x577.png)
Some thinking aloud about what’s happening on social media in my world, I hope you don’t mind.
Mastodon is a new social network, heavily inspired by Twitter but with a few differences: tweets are called toots, it’s populated by tusksome mammals instead of little birds, and it’s designed to run in a decentralised manner – anyone can set up their own ‘instance’ and connect to everyone else using the GNU Social protocol.
Colin Wright and I both jumped on the bandwagon fairly early on, and realised it might be just the thing for mathematicians who want to be social: the 500 character limit leaves plenty of room for good thinkin’, and the open-source software means you can finally achieve the ultimate dream of maths on the web: LaTeX rendering!