If you follow us on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Threads or Twitter, you might have seen us sharing links from botany.fyi. What’s going on? The answer is that we’re preparing for a post-Twitter future for the Week in Botany.

The Week in Botany has, for the past few years, been a compilation of links to items on Botany One and to the most popular items being shared on Twitter. It goes out every Monday. Originally, there were ways of automatically tracking what was getting shared on Twitter, and compiling the newsletter was relatively easy. Then Twitter bought the best tool and shut it down, making life a little more difficult. Then they shut down most of the other tools and, most recently, started hiding the links on Twitter to make it difficult to see what was being shared.

At the same time, Twitter, like other social media platforms, has a problem with hate speech. However, unlike other social media platforms, Twitter seems to think the best way to reduce complaints about hate speech is to crack down on those who complain. People are starting to move away from Twitter, which is fine. But they’re not moving to one specific platform, so tracking what’s popular on social media needs more work, and this is why there’s botany.fyi.

Botany.fyi is a link shortener. I can shorten a link to a paper so https://hyperborea.org/journal/2023/12/do-not-taunt-the-native-plants/ becomes https://botany.fyi/aVpFcK. Now, when I share this link to social media, whatever network I use, the click passes through botany.fyi and a counter goes up by one. This allows me to add up the activity from all the networks, including Twitter and see what is popular in terms of having people interested enough to click through to a story.

But if I’m including clicks from Twitter, how does this prepare the newsletter for a post-Twitter future?

The answer is that we’ve already had some interesting results. For the first week of the experiment, the click count from Mastodon was over eight times the clicks we got from Twitter. This is a mild surprise, as we have 16 times more followers on Twitter, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Twitter penalises tweets with links that take people off-site away from adverts. If the links we share tend to get hidden, then presumably yours do too. You can argue about whether or not Twitter is dying or dead, but it’s certainly increasingly irrelevant to any conversation that isn’t about Twitter or Musk.

You can find Botany One on Mastodon @botanyone@botany.social. We’re also on LinkedIn and Threads @botanyone_en.