iNaturalist on Mastodon

Wondering if there are plans for an official iNaturalist presence on Mastodon, and if there are other iNatters who are on that site.

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Hi, welcome to the forum. This was the reply from iNat staff given in a similar thread:

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I’m mostly using @dsacer@fediscience.org now

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I joined mastodon but haven’t really figured out how it works yet. If there’s ever an inat-centric server I’ll probably join it, but I’m generally not very active in social media except iNat itself.

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I’m colinpurrington@flipping.rocks (https://flipping.rocks/web/@colinpurrington).

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I have been posting #clamfacts there for ~4 years! I’m https://scicomm.xyz/@dantheclamman. There has always been a community of naturalists there, so it would be great to have iNaturalist there. There are a bunch of people looking into more efficient ways to host servers, such as via Raspberry Pi arrays, so maybe iNaturalist could set up their own hosted solution, for not much dough.

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https://scicomm.xyz/about says:

Registrations are closed for the time being so that we can better manage the recent intake of new accounts. Check back soon or register on another instance and migrate your account once we re-open :) Thanks for your patience!

So I suppose as tiwane said in the Twitter thread - right now is not a good time to join. At least not that server…

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Too bad actual mastodons are extinct or you could post a mastodon on iNat on Mastodon.

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I found some pieces of mastodon teeth in Texas a few years ago, but I think iNat generally frowns on fossil evidence, so I never bothered to post them.

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Yeah you’re right, scicomm is closed right now. :) I’m a mod there. But scicomm.xyz not the only server. By “there” I meant on Mastodon in general. The domain https://masto.ai for example is accepting registrations. It’s a fine time to join and make Mastodon account, just that posting right now is getting clogged by all the new activity. And for iNaturalist itself, might be ideal to make its own server if it wanted.

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MyFossil.org might be what you’re looking for!

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I’ve jumped from Twitter to Mastodon, joining our local mastodon.nz instance (@joncounts@mastodon.nz). I’ve been really enjoying it. Mastodon is better than Twitter in lots of ways (eg no adds, no algorithms, longer posts, you can attach audio as well as image files, people aren’t exaggerating to get more likes, etc.). I’ve quickly connected up with lots of other nature enthusiasts around the world, and researchers (who are flooding across from Twitter).

More iNat presence on Mastodon would be great. We’ve also been thinking about making an official iNat NZ presence on Mastodon, but aren’t sure which instance to do that through (mastodon.nz is only for individuals).

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I’d follow the official iNaturalist account on Mastodon if there was one.

Post #iNaturalist with your Mastodon account, so we can find each other. I’ll be posting observation pics from @nikokin@pixelfed.social

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It looks like the flipping.rocks Mastadon server is accepting new accounts. It’s a Mastodon server for nature geeks, so seems appropriate for iNat users.

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I guess a few are also on the ecoevo server!

Find me there @ValentinMoser@ecoevo.social
My beaver/bird/biodiversity science and the best naturalist observations :blush:

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I thought it would be cool if iNaturalist would support ActivityPub that links all the fediverse stuff so you could look at observations(but don’t let comments come through) directly on other platforms like Mastodon. Basically would function like an RSS feed of maybe some of your favorite people on here. Would take work, but would be cool is understandable that I am sure the devs for iNat are very busy and that is maybe not that important of a feature.

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Thank you for the kind mention! I am the flipping.rocks admin, and yes, I’d be happy for iNat users to sign up. I’m hoping to have a small community of other people into invertebrates, reptiles & amphibians, fungi, lichen, etc.

Interested people should check out the rules & information, and mention you saw this in the reply. I’ve been on Mastodon since 2016 and can help show new people the ropes.

Other servers people on here might like, whether to join or to find interesting people to follow, are photog.social (there’s a few iNat people who have been there for a while already), and ecoevo.social and scicomm.xyz, which have attracted many biologists from Science Twitter.

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I’m @CathK@mastodon.social (for now - will probably switch to another server eventually.)

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Welcome to iNat, @cae1! I hope there is an official iNat presence on Mastodon soonish. I’ve just moved there from Twitter as @seedtopia@nerdculture.de. Following the good suggestion in the comments here, I’ve added #iNaturalist to my profile. Still figuring things out, but just started posting nature photo or thought a day on Mastodon.

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Hey there!

EDIT: I decided to remove my Mastodon handle from here since I’m gonna make a new one that matches the new name I’m using here.


As for servers, I was about to suggest ecoevo.social but it seems @vmoser already did.

There’s also a fediscience.org , though you need to be an actual scientist to join that one, I think.

Meanwhile I’m tempted to join flipping.rocks but I probably shouldn’t make too many different accounts.

As a reminder to new folks: You don’t need more than one account. Though, you may find having multiple accounts useful for some things, such as checking local feeds on other servers, having alternate home feeds from following different people, and keeping different purposes/hobbies/interests separate.

(Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on any of this!)


Oh, I wonder if we can make use of https://a.gup.pe to basically gather together people/toots related to iNaturalist, in addition and/or as an alternative to following each other. Doesn’t seem like there’s a nature-related group there yet, but maybe we could create one?


I found some pieces of mastodon teeth in Texas a few years ago, but I think iNat generally frowns on fossil evidence, so I never bothered to post them.

I think this thread is about an official iNaturalist presence on Mastodon – not an official mastodon presence on iNaturalist! :P

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