2

Winter Storm Warning, Northeast Prince William Sound, 2025-01-11 10:03 AKST.

WHAT...Snow and blowing snow. Visibility reduced to one quarter mile or less at times. Additional snow accumulations of 2 to 3 feet. Winds gusting as high as 45 mph.

WHERE...Thompson Pass

WHEN...Until 9 AM AKST Monday.

IMPACTS...Travel could be very difficult.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Two back-to-back systems will bring periods of heavy snow to Thompson Pass. Reports this morning indicate nearly a foot of snow has fallen on the Richardson Highway at Thompson Pass, as of 9 AM, with visibility occasionally reduced to one quarter mile at times due high snow rates. Snow will taper off significantly this evening into the early overnight hours between systems before picking back up Sunday morning. Despite the relative lull in between storms, wind gusts in excess of 20 mph may result in blowing snow and reduced visibility at times. System #2 will arrive early tomorrow morning, with very heavy snow likely after 4 AM. Snow rates are expected to be well in excess of 1 in/hour through much of Sunday morning, which will reduce visibility to near zero at times. Snow will gradually taper off Sunday evening and overnight, ending on Monday.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?zoneid=AKZ132

#AlaskaWeather

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 97

A new non-profit for governance of Bridgy Fed, PeerTube releases their yearly update with a complete redesign, and the organisation behind Mammoth and sub.club winds down due to a lack of funding.

Editors note: I’ll be on holiday break for the next two weeks. The next edition of Last Week in Fediverse will be out on January 7th. Thank you for reading and supporting me in 2024!

The News

A New Social

A New Social is a new non-profit that launched today. The goal of A New Social is to build cross-protocol tools and services for the open social web. The organisation consists of Anuj Ahooja (CEO) and Ryan Barrett (CTO). The main project that they will be focused on is Bridgy Fed, the service that lets people connect their social accounts across a variety of networks and protocols.

Barrett wrote in early November about the possible futures for Bridgy Fed. Up until now, Bridgy Fed was his personal one-man side project. Conversations with other organisations like Flipboard and Meta gave Barrett a sense of urgency that the project was quickly trending towards becoming critical infrastructure for the open social web. Heated conversations earlier this year about how people should interact with the bridge (opt-in versus opt-out) also made it clear that such a tool should have cohesive governance, where Barrett writes: “it is about who makes those decisions, and how they should be made.”

Ahooja has come in as the new leader, to help build a structural organisations that can deal with the conversations around governance and decision making. Ahooja describes his vision as that of the ‘last network effect‘, which is worth reading in its entirety. In his view, the current state of the open social web is that of the exploratory phase, where neither ActivityPub nor ATProto have yet fully proven themselves at mass scale yet. Protocol bridges such as Bridgy Fed can bridge the gap: not only allows it for compatibility between platforms, it also bridges the gap in time. It allows us to commit to a platform now, without knowing for certain it the protocol that platform uses will be an important protocol in the future. This is possible because with bridged platforms and networks, you can take your own social graph with you.

In a conversation with Ahooja and Barrett, they say that people have rallied around A New Social very quickly, and that people have been very supportive of the organisation. The organisation has the support of Mastodon, Meta, Bluesky, IFTAS, SWF and Flipboard. It shows that there is a broader awareness that the open social web needs more organisations that are concerned with governance. The ATProto project of lexicon.community (not affiliated with A New Social) is another such example of people starting to work towards governance of internet infrastructure.

A New Social is looking to recruit a Board of Directors, as well as reaching out to developers to collaborate on tools and services that are needed for cross-protocol platforms. For development work, the main focus is on making the bridge more accessible and easier to understand: Barrett and Ahooja will be working on making the bridge easier to user with a cleaner UX, as well as on awareness and education what Bridgy Fed actually does. Ahooja is also clear on separating a protocol network from the platforms that make up a network. Each platform has its own culture and policies, and A New Social will be working with each individual platform on what approach to bridging fits their specific platform best.

Personally I think the fediverse has struggled for a while to make a clearer distinction between the fediverse as a single place and the fediverse as a network of different platforms. For me, the value of the fediverse is in the ability to build connecting platforms that each have their own culture, governance, moderation, and sense of place. A New Social is aware and mindful of this, and their approach of treating each platform as its own space can help further the fediverse towards a true super-network of interconnected digital places.

PeerTube v7

PeerTube v7 has officially been released, and the update brings a major redesign. Framasoft has been working on two major projects this year for PeerTube: mobile apps for Android and iOS (released last week), and a complete remodeling of the PeerTube interface. Framasoft has worked with designers for a thorough UX research, with tests and user interviews. Based on this the interface of PeerTube has been redesigned from the ground up. Framasoft has prioritised accessibility, they completed a full accessibility audit and used the findings to create the improvements and changes to the interface. Menus and pages have also been remodeled and simplified, to counteract some of the organic growth of all the options that has been build up over the years. The interface also looks a lot cleaner and calmer, with a more modern look.

As a sidenote: Framasoft says that they now refer to PeerTube servers as platforms, not instances. They give inclusion as a reason, saying that this term is easier to understand for people who are less well-versed in technology and the fediverse. I think this is a great change, and something that other fediverse software should consider as well. Platforms better communicates that each fediverse server is its own social network, that can have its own culture and governance. The value of the fediverse is that each platform can be its own separate digital space, and I find that the term platform communicates this better than instance does.

Shutdown of Mammoth and sub.club

The BLVD, the organisation behind three fediverse projects, has announced that they are shutting down due to a lack of funding. The BLVD has created the Mastodon iOS app Mammoth, fediverse creator payment platform sub.club, and the moth.social Mastodon server. All three projects will be shut down at the end of January 2025. The BLVD depended on Mozilla for their funding, and Mozilla announced in September that they are shutting down their fediverse projects. In November the organisation already said that they were now operating without any funding. Any community member that is interested in taking over the maintainance of one of the projects can get in touch. Bart Decrem, the founder of BLVD, said to The Verge that sub.club had more than 150 creators on the platform.

Nomadic Identity

Nomadic Identity is a mechanism that allows people to have their fediverse identity to be separate from the fediverse platform that they are using, which results them in being able to seamlessly switch their fediverse account to a different platform. The mechanism has been available in fediverse software Streams for multiple years, but it uses the fediverse protocol Nomad. The Nomad protocol has undergone some renaming (orginally Zot) over the years. Recently a new documentation website was launched for the Nomad protocol, which gives some more background information. The site also published an article explaining the concepts of Nomadic Identity.

There has been a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal for bringing Nomadic Identity to ActivityPub, and that proposal is now seeing it’s first implementation: fediverse software Mitra and Streams recently announced the first form of communications between them using the new nomadic implementation of ActivityPub. Account portability is a feature that is regularly used as an example of the valuable features that an open protocol such as ActivityPub enables, but using the actual implementation currently comes with frictions. Early adopters like the new product Weird are already thinking about offering Mitra as their fediverse platform of choice due to the new abilities that Nomadic Identity bring.

IFTAS needs assesment

IFTAS just published their Needs Assesments report, that gives a detailed overview of the state of moderation on the fediverse. They published this report just before I send out this article, but I want to include it because I think it’s important. So here are the key findings, in IFTAS’ own words:

Resource gaps – only 16% of communities have 24-hour moderator coverage, and nearly half of moderator teams lack formal guidance. That said, we see roughly one moderator for every 1,200 active accounts.
Top ranked priorities – moderators need tools for CSAM detection, spam prevention, and legal guidance for compliance with regulations like GDPR.
Burnout is a persistent issue – one in five moderators report experiencing trauma or burnout this year, underlining the need for wellness and resilience resources.
Financial struggles – most communities operate on donations, and overall our survey participants are not generating enough money to cover costs. Very few moderators are receiving any compensation for their labour.

The Links

Trunk & Tidbits for November 2024, Mastodon’s monthly engineering update.
Sharkey: a Fediverse project that is beautiful inside & out – Elena Rossini
How to Make Your First Loops Video – WeDistribute.
what people in the global majority need from networks – wreckage/salvage
A proposal for a working group for Integrating ActivityPub within Solid specs.
Event Bridge for ActivityPub: Upcoming 1.0 Release.
IFTAS December update.
Why Flipboard Looks to the Fediverse for Its Next Big Evolution – thelettertwo
Mastodon now gives server admins the possibility to opt-in to adding referrers to links. This allows other websites to see the traffic that a Mastodon server is sending.
Weekly fediverse software updates.
Alt Text Health Check image accessibility report #2.
Creating a generic “Log-in with Mastodon” service.
ActivityPub in Minecraft.
Loops ‘Unwrapped’ with some statistics about how Loops has been growing since launch.
Ghost’s weekly development update shares more about the reader client as well as their database design.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!

#2 #fediverse

https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-97/

Our Failed Political Press ™

H/T Scissorhead Jimmy-T

This morning’s Axios email thingie is giving us a master class in Passive Voice, which as we all know is the construction in which the Action (and not the Actor) is the subject. This is an interesting way to achieve Both Sides without having to ever write the dread phrase itself.

Generally you can spot Passive Voice by looking for verbs of being followed by a past participle. (Man is Bitten By Dog is the classic example, instead of Dog Bites Man. What Axios and modern passive voice writers would probably enbriefen [is too a vurb!] it to Man Is Bitten)

Here’s the lede:

Everywhere you look, signs are mounting of a tinderbox election that will test the outer bounds — and breaking points — of American democracy, honesty and civility, Axios’ Zachary Basu, Erin Doherty and Sophia Cai write.

“Signs are mounting” – who is mounting them…?

Why it matters: A perfect storm has been brewing for years now — fueled by extreme polarization, election denial, political violence, historic prosecutions and rampant disinformation. Mayhem is bound to rain down in November.

That bullet point has no Actor, but has actions: has been brewing, and is bound to. If you accept these actions without questioning who the Actor is, congrats, you’ve entered the Both Sides Zone!

Anyway, after setting up Both Sides, they then create a list of 5 Conditions for Chaos:

1. A desperate Donald Trump

2. A nail-biter like no other

3. A battleground legal brawl

4. The specter of violence

5. A cesspool of disinformation

The alert reader will notice that all five items are pretty specific to the Right and their plans, except for item #2. But if we look at the bullet points under the nail biter rubric we see that this is also from the Right:

In the 15 presidential elections since 1964, a candidate has led by more than five points in the national polling average for at least three weeks, according to CNN data analyst Harry Enten.
In 2024, that hasn’t been the case for a single day. The race is extraordinarily close — and will come down to tens of thousands of votes in just seven battleground states.
One nightmare recipe for chaos: A 269-269 Electoral College tie, which would trigger a contingent election in the House, whereby each state delegation casts a single vote. Trump would be likely to win in this case.

Yup, the last bullet point.

So we could list all the bullets under each of the 5 headings, and they all are warning or stating very clearly about Republican and Right Wing machinations in the 2024 Goat Rodeo, and they are all very clear about the Actor.

So the question is, why did Axios’ editors label this piece as America Braces for Chaos, rather than Republicans Create Chaos? And why did they paste that Both Sides introduction on the thing? You can draw your own conclusions, but my guess is a combo of cowardice (retribution from MAGA) and fear of losing access, which for access journalists is as close to purgatory as they can get.

So close, Axios!

You can read the whole thing here.

https://mockpaperscissors.com/2024/09/08/axios-swing-and-a-mess/

#2

Recently, we invited you to ask us anything! Today’s question comes from Falko Buschke (click that link for the full question, which I’m about to summarize).

Falko notes that, in the latest Clarivate journal citation reports, several leading ecology journals rank surprisingly low in impact factor (IF) among all 195 journals in the Clarivate “ecology” category. For instance, Journal of Ecology is only 20th in IF. Ecology is 32nd. Journal of Animal Ecology is 48th. Oikos is 56th. American Naturalist is 82nd. The question is, what, if anything, do the comparatively low IF ranks of these leading journals tell us about ecology as a field?

Falko took a few stabs at answering his own question. Maybe the low IF rankings mean these journals aren’t chasing trends:

Personally, I think the silver lining is that these journals are probably not jumping on publishing bandwagons, which is a sign that their editorial standards have been consistent. I reckon this is a good thing in the long-run.

On the other hand, maybe “not chasing trends” is just another way of saying “catering to a niche audience”:

But an alternative explanation could be that that the type of research in these journals is inaccessible or uninteresting to most researchers and lacks broad appeal (i.e. these journals have become echo chambers for like-minded thinkers).

On the third hand, maybe “not chasing trends” is just another way of saying “continuing to cater to American, British, and European authors and readers, while the field of ecology globalizes”:

A third possibility is that it is a sign of globalisation in ecology, where the centre of focus has moved away from the traditional strongholds in USA/UK/Europe.

Falko’s answers to his own question are so interesting, I was tempted to just let them stand and call it a day. 🙂 But that would be against the spirit of an AUA, so here are our answers:

Jeremy’s answer:

First, two minor caveats: Caveat #1: Impact factors are arithmetic means of highly right-skewed data. Most papers in any given journal draw few citations, while a few papers draw many. So a journal’s two-year IF, and IF rank, can bounce around a fair bit from year to year, as an occasional high-impact paper enters or exits the sample.* That’s why, if you’d compiled the same data a few years ago, you’d have found Ecology Letters ranked #1, if memory serves. Caveat #2: Three of the highly ranked journals in the Clarivate “ecology” category aren’t really ecology journals (Landscape and Urban Planning at #7, Ecological Economics at #10, International Journal of Sustainable Development at #11). Ok, the boundaries of “ecology” are fuzzy. And yes, there certainly are connections between ecology, urban planning, sustainable development, and economics. Closer connections than between ecology and, say, materials science or quantum mechanics. But you have to draw some boundaries if a scholarly field is to have enough coherence to be worthy of having a name. I’m fine with drawing a line between ecology, and urban planning or sustainable development or economics.

But those are minor caveats that don’t really undermine the premise of your question, Falko. Your premise is correct. It is in fact the case that the journals that I, and many of my friends in ecology, think of as among the “leading” journals in the field are in fact never at the very top of the IF rankings in ecology, or even particularly close. I think you’re right that that tells us something about the field of ecology. But what?

To fully answer that question, I’d think you’d want to go back through many years’ worth of the annual IF rankings. And also do a citation network analysis. Which would be work, so I’m not going to do it. (But Brian did! See below.) Anyway, just looking at the current IF ranking list for ecology, several answers jump out at me:

Ecologists love to cite review papers and methods papers. The #1, #3, #13, #16, and #18 ecology journals by two-year IF are review journals or methods journals.
One reason some leading US/British/European ecology journals aren’t all that high on the IF ranking list is…other leading US/British/European ecology journals. Nature Ecology and Evolution is #2 on the list, Ecological Monographs is #9, and Functional Ecology is #28.
Ecology as a field definitely has become more global and more applied since the early ’90s. One symptom of those shifts was the founding of new ecology journals focused on global scale data (especially biogeography), global climate change, and applied issues. Many (though far from all!) papers in those topic areas, and citations to papers in those topic areas, now go to journals that specialize on those topics, rather than to general ecology journals like Ecology. Global Change Biology is #5, Global Ecology and Biogeography is #12, Ecosystem Services is #13, Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment is #15, Ecography is #19, Conservation Biology is #21, Journal of Applied Ecology is #24, Biological Conservation is #25, Diversity and Distributions is #27, Ecological Applications is #34. Notice in particular that some of those global ecology and applied ecology journals are from the same scientific societies that publish leading general ecology journals like Ecology, JEcol, JAE, and Oikos. Those scientific societies did jump on a publishing “bandwagon” (really, a long-term shift in the direction of the entire field of ecology). But they did it by founding new journals, rather than by expanding the scope of their existing journals.
Another big change in ecology since the early ’90s is the rise of cheap gene sequencing and other genetic and molecular techniques. That made it a lot more feasible to study microbes. Hence the rise of microbial ecology, and of journals devoted to microbial ecology. (ISME Journal at #4, ISME Communications at #22). And the associated rise of journals devoted to molecular techniques, and to research based on molecular techniques (Molecular Ecology Resources, #18; Molecular Ecology, #30).
Chinese science is on the rise. Acta Ecologica Sinica (recently renamed Ecological Frontiers) is #26 on the list.
I definitely would not characterize any journals published by the ESA, BES, or Nordic Society Oikos as “echo chambers for like-minded thinkers”! Any more than I would characterize (say) Global Change Biology as an echo chamber for people who all think about global change.
I do think there are some journal-specific factors at work in some cases, but I’m not going to comment on them.

*Although IF doesn’t bounce around as much as I thought when I typed that sentence; see Brian’s answer below.

Brian’s answer:

Like Jeremy said, Impact Factor (IF) is driven mostly by the 3-10 most cited papers in a journal. Even a journal like Science has a median citation rate that is pretty pedestrian. It’s those papers with 100s of citations in two years (for Science, or 30-100 for more pedestrian journals) that drive the whole IF. Second I’ve never seen a perfect study, but as best I can tell the standard error bars around IF should be close to +/- 1.0 IF. That is pretty big. And when you look at rankings, changes of even 0.1 or 0.2 IF can make a big difference in ranking, so rankings are even noisier.

Second IF is only comparable WITHIN a field. As Jeremy said what counts as a meaningful comparison for a field is subjective. Just as an example, the top marine sciences journal (MEPS or Marine Ecology Progress Series has an IF=2.2 and a ranking of 93. Is that partly because marine scientists put papers with more general implications in general ecology journals? Yes. But comparable terrestrial journals that don’t get a lot of really general ecology papers have much higher IF. That is of course is not a signal of the quality or importance of a field, but rather the number of scientists publishing in the field. There are more terrestrial ecologists than marine ecologists. It is also a function of how fast the field turns around; the ISI IF counts only two years of impact – if you get cited a ton 3 years after you publish it doesn’t show in the ISI IF which has only a two year window. So (plausibly) if a really cool paper in MEPS inspires a lot of new experiments but they all take several years to get launched due to limits on ship time, etc, marine science will have a lower IF just due to turnaround time. Freshwater ecology has an even lower citation rate than marine, and paleoecology also is lower. Biomedical is much higher both because of number of scientists and speed of turnaround. So it’s really vital to only compare within a field.

When I was an Editor-In-Chief at Global Ecology and Biogeography I used to watch IF pretty closely. The June release was a bit like Oscars night for journal editors. As a journal editor I was torn by this. I regularly told the AEs to ignore IF and focus on the quality of the paper and the quality of the process. At the same time, I knew I would be having a pointed conversation with the managing editor who would definitely be discussing IF. To give Wiley credit, I don’t think they over managed for IF, but it was always discussed. But, worse, both they and I paid attention to IF because we knew authors were also looking closely at IF and choosing where to submit based on IF. So I felt an obligation to at least keep the status quo. As a result, despite telling AEs to ignore IF, I was always thinking about ways to game the system (mostly it consists of trying to get more review and methods papers, which I did, and holding likely hot papers to January of a new year so they had maximum time to accumulate citations in the 2 year window and pushing authors to cite papers in the same journal released in the last two years, both of which I did not do, but other EIC have done). But if you look at GEB, the trend in IF is pretty close to flat (bouncing around between 6.5 and 7.0). I think chasing IF per se is a pipe dream.

With those qualifications, what can we say specifically about Falko’s question about trends? Here is some hard data. I pulled down ISI IF for the ecology field for 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017, 2020, 2023 (the most recent year which was just released in summer 2024). I took the top 50 journals in 2023 and plotted trendlines for IF and ranking. I plotted trendlines for the ISI IF and the ISI rank (within ecology journals). The vertical scale for IF is 0-20 and the vertical scale for Ranking is 1-50 (50 being highest so that an upward trend is good). I’ve only shown sparkline trends as I don’t want to start treading into the waters of republishing ISI data. But I think it is enough for the story. Each red dot is a year (coming 3 years apart).

The types of society journals Falko mentioned are highlighted in grey. The two society journals that are of the type Falko mentioned that didn’t make the top 50 are AmNat (went from IF=4.67, rank=14 in 2008 to IF=2.4, rank=82 in 2023) and Oikos (went from IF=2.97, rank=33 in 2008 to IF=3.1, rank=61 in 2023)

So what does this tell us?

Most journals are pretty steady in IF. In fact clear long term trends are the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, the rankings can magnify very small changes in IF. I think constant IF, constant or dropping ranking mostly describes the society journals Falko mentioned. They are highlighted in light grey in the figure. Really, it’s actually pretty astonishing how IF of journals that have been around for more than 10 years or so have an almost constant IF.
If you look at who is at the top of the list, it is always going to be review journals and methods journals (TREE, AREES, FEE, ECOL LETT, METHODS). And after that a lot of the other top hitters are by subject area (remember comparing IF between subject area is a fools game). So microbial ecology (ISME) and global change ecology (GCB) rank high. Journals that tap into multiple fields like geography, environmental science, climate, etc all tend to get more citations too because of the size of the pool (e.g. GEB, Ecosystem Services, ISME, Ecography). All of these have always ranked higher than journals like Ecology or J. Animal Ecology or Oikos. This is just the nature of IF and not a sign of anything bad about those journals. In honesty, if you take out the new journals, the 2023 list looks an awful lot like the 2008 list, which brings me to …
The other big change is the new journals (most of the ones that don’t have six dots and a blue line all the way across). There were 124 journals in the Ecology category in 2008 and 195 in 2023; that is more than a 50% increase in 16 years! Nature Ecology and Evolution is the most obvious addition. I spoke about brand extensions elsewhere. I personally believe it is primarily responsible for the decline in Ecology Letters, although I cannot prove it. The next new ones are not really new – Landscape Urban Planning and Ecological Economics are both decades old and were classified in Ecology in 2008 but were not in the top 50 in 2008. So it’s a shortcoming of my methodology that they appear new. What really happened is they are the rare journals with a strong upward trend in IF that pulled them into my top 50 analysis. Most of the others that appear new since 2008 are. And they managed to pull off the feat of launching new at a high IF level. They launched at high IF through a variety of strategies (again brand extension for NEE, highly cited field for Ecosystem Services, review/opinion oriented format for Current Opinions in Insect Science. methods oriented format for Ecological Informatics and Molecular Ecology Resources). You can find a geography story in Acta Sinologica, but that’s actually pretty rare.
It is also hard not to notice that applied ecology journals (ecosystem services, global change, ecology of agriculture, human dimensions like economics and geography) are moving up, both in terms of raw number of journals and explain most of the cases of a strong upward trend in of citation/IF.

TL;DR: So, to summarize and directly answer’s Falko’s question:

I think in general society journals are doing just fine. Their IF is fairly flat (as are most other journals – this is not a case of flat means being left behind). Some like Oikos and Ecology seem to have dropped a lot in rank, but that is mostly a function of rank being hypersensitive and of new journals being created popping in ahead. I wouldn’t worry about shifts in rank.
I don’t think there is much evidence of geographic shift in journals (although there is a a profound geographic shift in authors. Authors are too busy chasing IF in their choice of journals to cause a geographic shift in journals. As long as authors chase IF, the establishment journals will remain the establishment.
I do think editors should focus on quality of process and quality of outcome and not chase IF. It barely works to chase IF anyway (unless you start to reach into unethical territory). I think most editors and journals are actually focusing on quality and process and probably making a few efforts here and there to increase IF, but not really having much effect.
Readers opinions about the growth of applied journals will vary. But its hard to imagine it will go away.
If I were to advise a society about its journals, I would not worry if IF was flat (even if this resulted in a drop in rank) for existing journals. Instead, I would be looking to launch new journals in applied areas (or in methods/opinion/review format, or trying to guess the next big trend like microbial ecology), rather than worrying about the existing journals. Which is mostly what is happening (e.g. BES launch of People and Society or ESA launch of Earth Stewardship and 20 years ago launch of Frontiers in Ecology and Environment).

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/07/03/ask-us-anything-some-leading-ecology-journals-rank-surprisingly-low-in-impact-factor-what-does-that-say-about-ecology-as-a-scientific-field/

#1 #10 #11 #12 #13 #15 #16 #18 #19 #2 #21 #22 #24 #25 #26 #27 #28 #3 #30 #34 #4 #5 #6 #7 #9

Unless I'm in the Next. Rule #2 of vending machines - It doesn't like the Next. Have a space does exactly the same colour as the lady says, Welcome aboard this ... service. #Eurovision Even the hosts tries to hide the A3010 whilst your back is turned binning the rest. I saw this picture of Rebecca Dykes is she has a depressing life cover advert sandwiched in the car park.