en.osm.town: Announcing a new Mastodon instance for OSM (en)

General talk
1

I’ve set up a Mastodon instance for OSM (english speaking)!

[https://en.osm.town/](https://en.osm.town/)

Mastodon is an open source, federated micro-blogging system, with more
than a million users. Basically open source twitter, spread across many
servers. This is a new instance/server focused on OpenStreetMap (there’s
already fr.osm.social for francophone OSMers). Like email, this server
(“instance”) talks to other servers, so anyone on the “fediverse” can
follow and interact with anyone on this server & vice versa. The “local
timeline” will only show toots (= tweets) from everyone on the server,
so will be full of OSM related stuff.

Let’s ditch twitter for something open, and under our control! No
adverts, no analytics, no “algorithmic” promoted tweets. 500 characters!
Let’s use mapstodon instead!

I’m mirroring some twitter accounts to it. I can turn them over the
appropriate people, or continue to auto post from twitter. I’ll create
more mirror accounts later.

 [https://en.osm.town/@openstreetmap](https://en.osm.town/@openstreetmap)
 [https://en.osm.town/@sotm](https://en.osm.town/@sotm)

More on Mastodon:

Follow me on mapstadon: https://en.osm.town/@rory

2

Because the question arose right now: why is there a en. in front of the url? Is it just meant for english-speaking content?

3

Mostly historical reasons. Although nearly all of the local content there is in English, we are open & welcome to non-English speaking users.

Initially I thought other language communities might want to have their own mastodon instance, so I made a en., but that hasn’t happened.