I’ve recently deleted my X, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, but I enjoy seeing iNaturalist’s observations of the day and other posts.
Are there any updated plans for iNaturalist to set up an account on platforms such as Pixelfed, Mastodon, Bluesky, or others? I see there was some discussion of a Mastodon account a few years ago, but I don’t see if that resulted in anything.
Failing that, are there good unofficial accounts that bridge or reshare iNat’s official posts onto those platforms?
From 2 months ago:
Ah great, thanks! I missed that one. Looking forward to it!
I’ll put in a good word for Pixelfed too as a nice place for photography content specifically; I’m finding it a pleasant alternative to Instagram.
Me too–I’ve been checking in on Bluesky in the hopes of seeing iNat there. :)
Seconding that I would love to see iNat on Bluesky!
I couldn’t determine if this account was an official iNat account or not:
https://bsky.app/profile/inaturalist.bsky.social
and someone provided this link as an ‘active iNat presence’
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5qffsgcrvg7lbhhxz6l7ip2x/feed/aaaapg7ifgtks
If there are currently no iNat accounts on Bluesky, those two using the iNat name and/or logo are misleading. Although, being an old, I’m not really sure what the function of the iNat logo is in that second link.
editing my post here to prevent the clutter of a ‘thank you’ post but…
Thank you @tiwane I read your reply and thought, ‘I need to look up what a feed is’ then I realized it was a link and it led me right to what I needed to understand! I’ve since pinned the feed and see how it displays and how I can access it.
This is it.
Looks like that’s an iNat-oriented “feed” created by @carancho, who’s a site admin for Argentinat. It collates iNat-related content.
What about following Observation of the day via RSS? In my view, this is a criminally underappreciated feature of iNaturalist. You can create a feed for anything you are interested in following. This way I can keep track of my favorite observers, taxa limited to a specific regions, observations from a selected area … in an organized system.
Would definitely love to see iNaturalist somewhere on the “fediverse” – i.e. Pixelfed, Mastodon, or anything else using the ActivityPub protocol.
I remember the last time it came up I jumped on board a Mastodon instance called flipping.rocks that an iNat user set up, and now that’s where I have my nature-nerding account. Of course, the official iNat account could be anywhere on the fediverse, as the different instances and platforms can communicate with each other.
“What about following Observation of the day via RSS?”
Crikey, yes please! Cheers!
flipping.rocks is a really nice space. Though, given that iNat (I assume) has a server centre somewhere, they’d have the option of spinning up their own instance quite easily
An iNaturalist instance sounds lovely. I can see how it wouldn’t be a high priority right now, but if such an instance existed I’d happily make it one of my Fediverse homes.
For mention, the network Friendica (that looks like an old Facebook) is part of the Fediverse (connects with mastodon, pixelfed…) and has built-in RSS, which means you can follow Observation of the day , a given taxon, observations in a given area… all from that social network.
https://friendi.ca/
I’d also suggest “verifying” the account by setting an official inat URL (like inaturalist.org) as the username. That would clear up any questions of legitimacy for the account, because you can only set a URL as a username by controlling the DNS records for that domain.
Here’s a link to the bluesky guide on verifying an account this way.
