I know ‘social media’ has a bad rap these days. However, it’s how I keep up with what’s happening in the industry. It used to be a lot easier when I could just point a feedreader at a few key blogs and that was it. After leaving Twitter before it became X, I had a short stent on Mastodon, but that got weird. Now it seems there are a lot of Geo people on Bluesky, but it still feels incomplete. How do YOU keep up with the latest trends and conversations within the Geospatial world?
Mastodon is still weird, just for the record. I feel like it’s a good place to keep up with how other curmudgeons feel about shapefiles.
Some of the QGIS devs are on there, and a few Cloud Native Geospatial folks as well. Everything skews more FOSS / European, but I do see links and threads on there that feel relevant to me.
It’s pretty easy for me to feel burnt out or overwhelmed by social platforms and apps, though. Besides Mastodon, I’m on two forums related to OpenStreetMap, one for OSGeo, and then there’s a Slack space for OpenStreetMap US. I’m mostly just lurking in those spaces, but I check in a couple times a week.
There are one or two email newsletters and blogs I subscribe to as well.
To your question, though
How do I keep up? It’s one topic / software / project / person at a time, often in its own space. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but my experience of “the geospatial world” is pretty fractious.
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