FediRoster

Introduction

FediRoster is a slightly more heavyweight alternative to David Adler’s Sociologists on Mastodon software. It is intended to function as a public list of Mastodon and other fediverse accounts, geared primarily towards academic communities, but suitable for others as well. It offers functions for following listed accounts individually or in bulk. The main novelty here is that you can add yourself to the list through an authentication process instead of all the work falling on a list maintainer. You can sign in through your Mastodon account or send a message to the list’s bot to verify your account ownership. This also means that the hosting process for new lists is a bit more involved (it’s a Python/WSGI application).

It was first developed for the HCI Directory, a list of human-computer interaction researchers on the fediverse. It has since been released as an open source project that can be self-hosted. Its current state is stable, but not quite ready for widespread use. Administrators willing to experiment and to keep up with version upgrades can now get a head start.

Project Philosophy

One of the more commonly observed obstacles for people getting started on Mastodon is connecting with their communities and finding interesting people to follow. This is a difficult problem with no one-size-fits-all solutions. Academic communities in particular have seen some success alleviating it through public opt-in account lists for various fields of research, augmenting the network’s discoverability by building lists of people working on related issues who want to be easily found by kindred spirits. FediRoster is a tool to help streamline this process.

The design of FediRoster is guided by the two core values equality and consent, which are commonly emphasized in fediverse-adjacent projects. The main manifestation of equality is that FediRoster eschews information such as credentials, experience, or formal titles, instead relying mainly on names and areas of interest to connect people. The project is intended to facilitate connections between humans more than self-presentations by experts.

Regarding consent, this software inherits a “no exceptions to opt-in” stance from the Academics on Mastodon meta project. It postulates that the only person who should decide whether an account appears on a public list is the owner of that account. Through its strict account authentication, FediRoster ensures that only the person in question can add themselves, edit their information, or remove themselves from the list. While manual data entry by list administrators is possible (at the end of the day, someone still owns the hard drive), the software contains no affordances for e.g. bulk additions.