Mastodon

Ile-de-France Planets is on Mastodon! We post about planetary science events occurring in Ile-de-France, scientific discoveries made by researchers in our laboratories, and funding opportunities in Ile-de-France. If you would like to keep up to date with the planetary science activities in Ile-de-France, please consider following our @IDF_Planets account! If you don’t have a Mastodon account, you can sign up for a free account on the planetary science community instance solarsystem.social.

Interact with our bot

If you are a planetary scientist working in Ile-de-France, you can have your Mastodon posts automatically boosted by our account, or you can post directly using our account. We use a bot to do this, and in order for the bot to recognize you, it is necessary for the @IDF_Planets account to follow you. Just send us a message and we will be happy to add you to the list.

Automatically boost a post

If you would like to post something on Mastodon using your own account, and have @IDF_Planets automatically boost this post, just include

!@IDF_Planets@solarsystem.social

at any place in your post. The bot looks for such posts every 5 minutes, and when a post is found, it will be automatically boosted.

Post directly using @IDF_Planets

If you would like to post something directly from the @IDF_Planets account, you only need to send a private message to @IDF_Planets. To do so, start your post with

@IDF_Planets@solarsystem.social

Then, make sure that the post visibility is set to “private”: depending on the client you are using, this could be something similar to “@”, “mentioned people only”, “direct message”, or the mailbox symbol. The bot will search for these private messages every 5 minutes, and then repost everything that comes after @IDF_Planets directly from the @IDF_Planets account.

Please be careful, as every direct message to @IDF_Planets is reposted if this account follows you! If this causes problems, we will deactivate this functionality.