There’s a new, decentralized social media platform called Mastodon that appears to be growing very fast.  I know, I know, we’ve seen this before. Ello was supposed to challenge Twitter, Diaspora was supposed to challenge Facebook, so what’s different this time?

Maybe nothing. You may want to wait a while before committing to yet another social media platform. But what if your preferred Mastodon username is gone by the time you decide to get on at a later date? Or what if an incident or disaster occurs and people start using Mastodon to share relevant info? Why not go ahead and get account set up just in case, or as an exercise, to see how fast you can set up and start using a new platform? I would argue that the more places we’re able to look for relevant info, the more likely it is that we’ll be able to help people when they need it.

Here are some statistics on Mastodon usage that may help convince you that it’s worth your time to look into Mastodon.

A little background:

Mastodon was created near the end of 2016 by a gentleman in Germany named Eugen Rochko. You can read about his concept and the ongoing process of building Mastodon on his blog. He says that Mastodon will remain ad-free, and efforts are underway by most Mastodon instances (Since Mastodon is decentralized, it does not exist on one main server, but instead there are “Mastodon instances” set up on multiple servers.) to create spaces for civil discourse by setting rules that encourage this. In my view, these factors make it seem likely to be a very successful platform, and the buzz and growth during April 2017 have encouraged me and a few others in our #SMEM – #VOST community to sign up and try it out.

I’ve built some instructions for setting up your account (see below) and listed a lot of helpful resources, so look there for more info. I’ve only just joined myself this week, so let’s learn about it together! If you want to mock me for this, please do so on twitter at @sct_r. If you’re interested or enthusiastic about it, let’s talk about it on Mastodon. I’m there at: @sct_r@mastodon.xyz

Instructions for setting up a Mastodon account:

1- Select a Mastodon instance from this list: https://instances.mastodon.xyz/list

2- Go to the start page for the Mastodon instance that you select.

3- Enter a username, email and password, then click  the “get started” button.

4- Go to your email and click on the “Confirm my account” link to verify your new account. This link takes you back to your Mastodon instance to log in and verify your new account.

5- Once you’ve signed in to Mastodon, you’ll see a tweetdeck-style page with columns. On the left column, click on “Edit profile” to fill out your display name, bio, and upload your avatar and header picture.

6- The search window is in the left column, above your profile. So far it appears that search results produce results from words/names listed in account bios, and hashtags.

6a- Enter some keywords or hashtags for things that you’re interested in to find other accounts to follow. ( A couple of us just started posting with the #SMEM and #VOST hashtags there, so maybe start there.)

7- If you know a person’s account name, you can search it to try and find them. Here’s how to do that. We’ll use my account as an example.

7a- If an account is on the same instance as yours, you can enter the account name only like this: @sct_r

7b- If an account is on a different Mastodon instance than yours, you can still search it using the account name to try to find it on other instances.

7c- Full account names include both your username as well as the specific Mastodon instance that you have registered on. So for instance my full account name on the mastodon.xyz instance is: @sct_r@mastodon.xyz  If you know the full account name for the person that you’re looking for, enter that in the search window.

8- Now post your first toot! ( yeah, I know, that sounds weird.) Mastodon suggests that your first posts should include some hashtags describing your interests so that other users interested in those subjects can find and follow you. I highly recommend that your toot include the #SMEM and/or #VOST hashtag so that all of us interested in #SMEM and #VOST can find each other!

NOTE: I chose to use my twitter account name on Mastodon. This is not required, I simply did this to make it easier for my twitter friends to find me.

NOTE 2: Registering your preferred account name on one instance does not automatically register that account name on all instances, so other people can register your account name and use it on other instances. (You can register on multiple instances if you like, but I would suggest choosing one for now and making it your main account for the time being until we see how Mastodon grows and evolves. I’ll probably go register my preferred login on a few main instances, but there are already over 1,200 instances listed on the list above.)

NOTE 3: Many Mastodon users refer to twitter as “the birdsite”.

MORE NOTES: Some things I’ve learned by spending some time on several Mastodon instances:

-It appears that, much like the early days of twitter, posts (toots) will not be visible for more than a couple of weeks. So for now, if you’re saving info on a post for some reason, I would save a link to the post, but I’d also save the full text of the post, and if appropriate, depending on team/agency policy, a screenshot of the post if it is thought to be important.

-Search is currently very limited. A word or name entered in the search bar currently seems to search a database of accounts, and also creates a hashtag search that searches all affiliated posts from the federated timeline.

-You can run a hashtag search without logging in to Mastodon like this:

https://mastodon.social/tags/needhelp

(just enter the hashtag after “/tags/”)

Manuals/Guides/Instructions for using Mastodon

 “A Guide to the Mastodon Social Network” by @Crackmacs (very helpful!)

Opensource.com: “A beginner’s guide to microblogging on Mastodon“

Mastodon Resources, Posts and Videos and Apps

Mastodon Resources:

“Welcome to Mastodon What’s different and why it’s better”: a blog post by Eugen Rochko, Creator of Mastadon (3/31/17)

Mastodon.Social “About” page

Mastodon Social Wikipedia article

A list of all Mastodon Instances

Mastodon discussions on Reddit

Medium account for Eugen Rochko, Creator of Mastodon (many blog posts on building Mastodon)

Welcome to the Mastodon Community Wiki, aka #MastoWiki.

Mastodon User guide on github.com

Tools/services/helpful websites:

Here’s a site for viewing the local (or federated) stream of any Mastodon instance. (Thanks to social.tchncs.de building for this.)

This website is a tool for finding your Twitter friends in the federated Mastodon network. As long as your friends have signed on here with both accounts, you can find them.

Mastadon post scheduler

Worldmap of Mastodon Users and other Mastodon Stats

Articles and blog posts about Mastodon:

Chronicle of Higher Education website: “Are You on Mastodon Yet? Social Network of Our Own” (11/28/16)

Mastodon User Guide by a new user (3/3/17)

Mashable: “Bye Twitter, all of the cool kids are moving to Mastodon” (4/4/17)

Motherboard: “Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It?” (4/4/17)

Mashable: “Want to be verified on Mastodon? Do it yourself, tooters” (4/6/17)

Says.com: “People Are Leaving Twitter To Join This New Social Media Site” (4/6/17) 

Mashable: “The coder who built Mastodon is 24, fiercely independent, and doesn’t care about money” (4/6/2017)

Opensource.com: “A beginner’s guide to microblogging on Mastodon” (4/6/17)

The Verge: “A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the hot new open-source Twitter clone” (4/7/17)

Hackernoon: “What I Wish I Knew Before Joining Mastodon” (4/9/17)

MalwareBytesLabs: “Mastodon: different social network, additional risks” (4/10/17)

Wired: “Like Twitter But Hate Trolls? Try Mastodon” (4/13/17)

Mashable: “In the rapidly expanding Mastodon fediverse, there’s an instance for everyone” (4/15/17)

Newbie’s FAQ on Mastodon social network (4/19/17)

Holtz.com: “Mastodon: Here to stay or DOA?” (4/20/17)

“Toot Toot Tweet Tweet” (4/24/17) A well written and thoughtful post considering Mastodon vs Twitter from a new Mastodon user’s perspective.

PR Daily:  “Is Mastodon doomed to extinction?” (4/28/17)

And of course there’s Reddit r/Mastodon_Social or r/MastodonSocial

Videos/Podcasts about Mastodon:

Note: (There are a lot of videos about Mastodon on YouTube – you can do a search there, but here are a few that I’ve screened that should be helpful):

Open SourceCraft YouTube video: “What is the Mastodon Social Network?” (5/3/17)

YouTube – “Why’s Everyone Talking About Mastodon?” – Hak5 2205 (4/12/17)

YouTube – PmD Interactive: “How to use Mastodon.social” (4/16/17)

YouTube – Chris Were’s Tech Channel: “Mastodon.social, a new, open source, federated social network that works with GNU Social” (4/19/17)

YouTube – “Mastodon Social First Look” (4/11/17)

Mastadon Apps

Here’s a page listing Mastodon apps.

I’ve tried web-based Mastodon in a web browser (seems to work well on Firefox, Chrome and Safari), and I’m using Amaroq on my iPhone (the only Mastadon app in the Apple store so far.)

#SMEM-sters and #VOST-ies are disaster geeks. We love our tools and methods of operating. While we share a love of innovation and trying new things, some of us (I am including myself in this) can be resistant to changing our basic tools and procedures; they’ve served us well for several years on disaster activations of all types and sizes, so why change?

We try to keep the basic tools/techniques standardized so that any VOSTie can walk right in to assist another team, and can almost immediately be helpful. Yet teams often need to customize and try different things to make the VOST concept work for them. For example, Skype has long been our standard place to set up text-based chat “work rooms” where the team has their ongoing discussion and shares links during activations, yet many teams have tried other platforms such as Google Hangouts, and more recently teams are using Slack as the place for immediate text-based team communication.

I prefer evolutionary changes/iterations in our tools as opposed to big shifts. I think it’s great that teams go their own way and try new stuff, then share what works and what doesn’t. We can all learn from these efforts. With that in mind, I’m offering a few suggested evolutionary changes to the workbook below that I hope will be helpful to those of us starting new teams, and perhaps some of our older teams too. I’d love to hear from other teams/members about what changes you’ve made to the standard VOST workbook to make it work for your agency; who knows, maybe someone else has already tried some of these ideas too.

Suggested New Workbook Tabs

Over the past few activations I’ve noticed that some of our new recruits and trainees struggle to understand the VOST workflow, especially in relation to searching and saving search results. Many struggle, even after trainings, explanations and reading through our documentation. There are a lot of moving parts to grasp. Those of us who’ve been working VOSTs for a long time just jump in and get to work, and when new people come in the chat/workroom, we’re always happy to explain and answer questions, but I think that there are a few VOST workbook modifications that will help new folks to learn and get comfortable with the workbook faster.

It is ALWAYS preferable to bring in your trainees ahead of time, work with them in trainings and exercises, and then ease them in to activations. Yet the reality for many new teams is that this is not always possible. We need to improve our “just in time training” capabilities for onboarding new and spontaneous recruits, and I hope that these suggested workbook modifications will address this.

I’ve already started using the two new tabs listed below with Oregon VOST, but the suggested changes to the “Search Results” tab described and depicted below are new, and I hope to test the concept out on upcoming disaster exercises. Please have a look at this example VOST workbook Search Results tab and let me know what you think. The entire current VOST workbook template is available here, thanks to my colleague Marlita Reddy-Hjelmfelt.

The ONBOARD INTRO Tab

This tab is a built-in VOST workbook explainer and how-to guide for new team members to get started. While other team members are always happy to help with one-on-one guidance and questions, sometimes it can be a little hectic during the activation and it may take time for people to get back to a new person. I think that this will help people to understand what’s going on in the room make them more comfortable with getting started.

The INSTRUCTIONS Tab

This tab is for very detailed instructions for any tool or platform that needs explaining. This tab is not just for new trainees; even us long-time VOSTies don’t always know how to operate in every platform, or we sometimes need a refresher, especially when there have been important changes to major platforms. Instructions saved in this tab will also help new trainees get connected to the team in the chat room and get invited to the shared workbook.

Changes to the way we operate in the “Search Results” tab.

This is probably the most “radical” operational change that I’m suggesting, and here’s why I think that it’s important. Up to now, most teams have simply logged search results in chronological order as they find them.

First of all, saving search results only in the order in which we find them without organizing them gets messy once there start to be a large number of results.

Second, when new people come in to the VOST chat and workbook, it can be disconcerting to try and figure our what’s going on. We’re talking over each other in overlapping conversations in the workroom, and we’re rapidly saving results in to the workbook search results. There is no discernible order or categorization, except in the mind of the Team Lead or the person who they’ve assigned to analyze the results and write the report. This means that new members aren’t seeing how the analysis happens, and it will therefore take longer for them to grasp what we’re doing, and they may in fact never move past monitoring and searching unless they ask someone to help them understand the analysis and reporting.

Even for those with analysis and reporting experience, the lack of organization or categorization in the search results makes it harder to analyze them and identify patterns. The analysis, which explains the current issues, needs and situations we’re identifying from the search results make their way directly in to the VOST Social Listening Reports. So when all search results are saved as we have been doing, in chronological order as we find them, they are not organized and it is difficult to see patterns and levels of importance in the results.

On a recent activation (Oregon VOST on the Umpqua Community College shooting activation), we divided up specific search tasks in to several new tabs, which definitely helped to make the search results easier to scan for analyzing. On events that have a large number of search tasks, this may still be a good way to go, but I think that there may be a better way to do this.

I suggest that we keep all search results in one tab and separate search results in to report periods. I suggest that instead of saving search results in the order in which we find them, that we instead list them first by levels of urgency, then by type. There is, in my view, no discernible value in saving the results in the order in which we find them as long as we are working with a current set of results in a given time period. We will still log the time that we save each result, but the results will be saved in groups according to urgency, then according to topic. Then lastly, I suggest that we call out and highlight the analysis in the search results cells, in the cell directly below the actual results that have led us to the analysis description.

I believe that this change will streamline the analysis and reporting process, and also will make our analysis/reporting process more transparent to the new team members, leading them to learn the analysis/reporting process more rapidly, which helps to create more team members capable of performing analysis and writing the social listening reports.

This method of operation in the search results tab will also help new team members to understand what we’re looking for, and how we decide what needs to be escalated immediately to our EM contact, and will help to teach them how to identify trends or significant issues. I think that this will also improve search results as people grasp more firmly what we’re looking for, and understand the workflow better.

Procedures for making this work

New procedures are needed for this to work, but nothing that is difficult. A team lead can simply add the new Search Results tab to their existing workbook. Then, when operating the workbook, the procedure is:

• Open the Search Results tab.
• Add the date in the black line, and the beginning/ending report period times in to the gray line.
• Start logging and organizing the search results in to their appropriate categories.
• There is even a “Miscellaneous” category for those results that don’t seem to fit an existing category, or results that fit in more than one category. (Note: There would be no harm in saving the same search result in to two categories; saving it to more than one category just means that there is more than one issue being addressed in that result.)
• Organize matching issues within the categories.
• Once you’ve identified an issue for an “analysis bullet” based on significant results or repeats of similar results, add a new row, title it “ANALYSIS:” then describe the issue and why it’s significant. If you have a recommendation regarding what should be done, add it. (Use a color code or text color to highlight the analysis.)
• At the end of the report period, go in the work room and ask people to hold off adding new search results for a moment while you archive.
• Copy out all current search results and archive them (I would recommend moving them down and saving them in order in the same tab so that the team can easily go and view them, but mark them clearly as archived so that people don’t start to add new results there.)
• Paste in new blank search categories and tell everyone they can start saving results for the new report period.

Note: there is more to social media analysis than I have described above, but for the sake of completing THIS post, brevity is best. Analysis and reporting is for another post (note to self).

Here’s a link to a copy of the modified workbook.

Hope this is helpful. @sct_r

Thanks to Lise St. Denis for our great conversation this morning prior to my sharing this. Your feedback and suggestions were very helpful!

I’d also like to credit Canada VOST here. It was their line breaks in their Search Results workbook tab that led me to think about how we could improve the search results tab. They were already breaking search results in to report periods by adding a black separation row that said “Use Updates from here down for (date) Situation Report Update”. I think that other teams may have been doing this as well, but it was while helping with the recent Canada VOST activation for Fort McMurray that I saw the “report period” technique in action, and that’s what got my gears turning on that.

UPDATE 5/22/16:

There’s a great new May 2016 report by the DHS Virtual Social Media Working Group (#VSMWG): “From Concept to Reality: Operationalizing Social Media for Preparedness, Response and Recovery”.  I was inspired by Mary Jo Flynn’s “Social Media JIC Decision Matrix” in this report to edit my new search results tab to align with the matrix, and this also inspired me to add a new “Pre-Approved Responses” tab to the sample workbook. I plan to test this out on the upcoming Cascadia Rising exercise. This of course will not be useable by all teams, but it seems like a logical step for those with in-house teams or trusted/verified teams. Perhaps this function could be housed in the “Key Websites and Resources” tab, especially for smaller activations, since some of these resources will already be collected there anyway.

More VOST Workbook Resources:

Cheryl Bledsoe’s CRESA “VOST Field Operations Guide”

Marlita Reddy-Hjelmfelt “VOST Workbook Template” is on Mar’s blog TheRedElm.com

Caz Milligan and I wrote the VOST Basics Slideshare presentation. The update will be out soon! Watch for it!

I’m currently working with Oregon Office of Emergency Management and some other great Oregon and Washington area emergency managers to build a VOST. I mentioned recently on the VOST Leadership Coalition call that the Oregon VOST group has had a couple of introductory meetings, and then on May 5th we had our first training. We had 20 people in the EOC in Salem for this, and we had another 40 or so on the webinar. Our next training will be on June 17th. (If interested in participating in this training, contact me or Cory Grogan, OR-OEM Public Information Officer.)

Aside from solid VOST interest from people in Oregon, we’re getting lots of interest from Washington state emergency managers. This has made the Oregon OEM PIO and I reconsider our strategy, and we’re now thinking of a possible regional VOST that will train both Oregon and Washington folks at the same time. We’ll be talking this week with representatives from Washington about the possibility of a regional team and how that would work.

I’ve reserved some VOST team names on twitter, facebook, Instagram and WordPress to be ready to use as needed, since we’re now moving relatively quickly towards having a team (or teams?) to use these resources; first for outreach, then for training, then for regular use by the team as needed. Some of the VOST names reserved are ORVOST, WAVOST and CascadiaVOST. It’s important to acquire these accounts on all major platforms so that they are not grabbed and held by others who may not be part of our actual VOST movement (this has happened recently; some VOST account names are being held by unknown parties.).  Since these newly forming teams are not yet official and functioning, and the possible team names are not set yet, they are not yet registered with VOSG.us, which for the time being is the place where VOST logos and teams are sharing team info and entering the VOST system.

I look forward to a day in the near future when these tentative VOST resources are official and being used regularly to help emergency managers and the communities they serve, and the disaster survivors that we all want to help. When that day comes, I know that our new VOSTs and VOST Team members will be welcomed in the All Things VOS Skype room where we all discuss VOST-related activities and news, and to the VOST Leadership Coalition. I look forward to registering those new VOST accounts as active, official VOSTs.

We’re getting close to the day when that will happen, and I appreciate the help of all who’ve been so welcoming to our new VOST friends. Thanks to all of you, both forward-thinking emergency managers and the amazing, talented, enthusiastic VOST volunteers who I’ve so enjoyed working with and learning from. I look forward to continuing to work with you all on building the VOST concept out for all who want and need one of these teams of awesome people.You all inspire me. @sct_r

The question mark search is one of the best searches that you can run on twitter during a disaster or incident. It gives you some insight in to what people are thinking, asking or needing to know.  You can run a question mark search with a geosearch of a specific area, or a question mark and hashtag or keyword search; this can immediately give you a look at what is known and not known, what are the concerns and needs, both on site and off site.

It’s also a great way to see what people that you follow on twitter are asking, working on or thinking about at any given time, and a great way to learn to use question mark searches on twitter. Try it some time! Here’s how. First, open your twitter account on twitter.com.

Type a question mark in the search window and run the search (click on magnifying glass icon or press “Enter”.)

Now click on “People you follow.”

The results will be all tweets from people that you follow containing question marks (and questions usually).

 This is a great way to get to know those that you follow. You might even be able to help people by answering their questions, or get a great twitter conversation going.

Next, we’ll refine the search by adding additional keywords to the search. It happens to be Valentines Day, so let’s just add the word Valentine to our question mark search and run it again.

Play around with this yourself. Maybe try adding a hashtag or a geosearch to it to see what you get.
Happy Valentines Day from thinkdisaster blog!

UPDATE: I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me earlier: try the same search with a heart instead of a question mark! <3 (keep in mind that when you run that search on twitter before you refine the results, you may get some NSFW (not safe for work) content. Use your best judgement.

Here’s my <3 search results:

This is a quick and rough tutorial that I just completed for a volunteer effort that I’m helping with. I thought it might helpful others, so I’m sharing it here – hope it’s helpful. ^sr

____________________________

1 – Go to Bing Maps to get the latitude/longitude for the search:

http://www.bing.com/maps/

2 – enter the location in the search bar. if you have an address, include it, but you can also use a town name and state, or a town name and country.

NOTE: On occasion you will get more than one result – usually when this happens, if you can’t verify the incident location in the information provided, seek to verify location by searching for additional information, starting with Google Maps, then Wikipedia. (or if you have team members familiar with the incident location, ask for assistance in verifying.)

2a – Take the time to drop your newly copied lat/long in to Google Maps and confirm visually that this is the location you are wanting to search.

It’s good to double-check your results on a couple of platforms.

____________________

3 – The latitude/longitude result will appear on the left of the Bing window. I recommend you open a “worksheet” (such as a plaintext document or notes document) which is sort of like “digital scratch paper”.

Here’s the above setup if you want to just copy/paste it to your own worksheet:

location:
lat/long:
geocode:_____,10km
_____________________________________
location:
lat/long:
geocode:_____,10km
_____________________________________

4 – Copy the lat/long and paste it to your worksheet.

5 – Also paste the lat/long into the placeholder area of the saved geocode template. (double click the underlined area in the geocode template; that’s where the lat/long goes – make sure there are no spaces between the colon and the comma, or the geocode search won’t work when you take it to twitter search)

6 – Now copy and paste the entire geocode from the worksheet over to twitter search window.

7 – The search above is set to a search radius of “10km” or 10 kilometers.You can make the size of the search as small as .1km or as large as 2500km. Just delete the 10 and change it to the size you wish to search.

I tend to start with a moderate size search, depending on the estimated population density. (run some test searches to see what kind of results you get, then change the search radius, making it larger and smaller to see the effect.)

8 – If you aren’t finding the information you expected to see in this area by making the search smaller and larger, t’s time to add some additional search terms to your geocode search.

Try adding words that are common to the type of incident that you are searching. For instance, if there is a severe windstorm or hurricane, first you would try searches using words like “storm”, “trapped”, “damage”, “power out”, then later in the disaster you’d be running searches such as “shelter” “closed” “open”, “missing” “lost”. Also remember to occasionally run question mark searches, like this:

[? geocode:46.189770,-123.833946,10km]

Question mark searches will often help you to spot needs and trends.

9 – Once you’re getting useful search results, take the information that you’re finding back to your group and share. If you think it’s important, remember to save the URL for the page so that you can get back to it later.

I’m in the process of putting together a search term directory/index for various types of disasters. I’ll link to it here once I have that done or well underway.

Additionally: It’s also helpful to have some common geocode searches prepared in a spreadsheet in advance. Here’s what that can look like:

I’m going to build a prepared template in googledocs and share soon.

________________

description of how to convert military location coordinates

to a useable lat/long format for geocode searches.

Converter for military location coordinates to lat/long for geocode searches is here: http://www.earthpoint.us/convert.aspx

Some military coordinates are given like this: N112131 E1253766 -copy and enter that into the “Position” window in the converter, then pres “Calc” button to get lat/long result – it will look like this:

Degrees Lat Long 11.3586111°, 125.6350000°

-take out the “°” and the space, so that it looks like this:

11.3586111,125.6350000

-now copy this lat/long to your geocode search.

________________

NOTE: Also see in-depth instructions and search walk-through here: “finding and sharing disaster info on twitter” on this blog. ^sr