What is SolarSystem.social?solarsystem.social is a Mastodon server for the planetary science community.
Who can join?Any professional working in the field of planetary science can join, including:
students, postdocs, researchers, professors, engineers, and administrators,
institutions, societies, communities, academic journals and publishers,
journalists, science educators, science promoters, and the occassional well-behaved bot.
When creating an account, please let the moderator know who you are and how you fit the above criteria. If we can not verify that you are an active planetary scientist, your account will not be approved. If this server is not for you, please consider joining one of the other great communities on Mastodon, such as those listed on
Academics on Mastodon.
What can you talk about?You can post on any subject that interests you, personal or professional, including (but not limited to) planetary science!
How can I find accounts to follow?First, check out the opt-in list of
planetary science accounts on Mastodon.
Second, you can use
Followgraph for Mastodon. This returns a list of accounts that are followed by the people you follow.
How is this server funded?The administrators of this site pay for both the domain name and the hosting at
masto.host. The base operating cost for a small instance of a hundred users is about two hundred dollars per year, but as the number of accounts grows, so will the cost of maintaining it. If this mastodon instance is to serve the entire planetary science community, it will require donations from its members.
How to donate?There is no requirement to donate to create an account, but if you would like to see this community thrive, please consider setting up an appropriate donation. Break even costs for running this server would be about 1-2 dollars per year if every user contributed. We accept several types of donations:
- Liberapay.com (recurring donations)
- ko-fi (one-time or recurring donations)
- PayPal (one-time donation)
- crypto, bank transfers, other (contact admin)
All donations will be used exclusively for maintaining solarsystem.social activities. Excess funds will either be used to fund future operations or to develop additional services (such as a peertube instance, a pixelfed instance, or a matrix server, for example).
Privacy statementWe will never provide or sell any information about any of our users to any party. We do not require you to use your real name, and we encourage you to use single-use email addresses. Nevertheless, please be aware that all your posts are public, and that private messages are not end-to-end encrypted. You should expect that anything you post here will eventually be consumed by data scrapers and search engines. We host this server using masto.host, but even though they also respect your privacy, data breaches can occur. If you need to communicate with someone privately, please use an end-to-end encrypted messenger.