Inside LabourStart

As the crisis at Twitter deepens, many people have begun to use alternatives — most notably, Mastodon.  Our account there, which has been live for just two weeks, has 144 followers and is growing every day.

This week we announced on social media and in a mailing to the English list that we’d be hosting a webinar today (Friday, 2.12) to introduce Mastodon to trade unionists.  We’ve gotten Tim Wilde, the founder of The Union Place server on Mastodon, to join us on the panel.  Over 225 people from 44 countries — including nearly all the global unions — have signed up to participate.  The webinar is being recorded and we will make it available on the weekend.

In order to pre-register people, we had to create a signup page and a small database, which was done.  This tool can now be easily modified and recycled for other events, both online and offline.  We’ve been tweaking and improving LabourStart’s back end every day this week and continue to plough through a very long list of changes that need to be made to the site.  It’s a slow process but we are moving forward again.

Meanwhile, we’re waiting to hear back from our partners in Georgia about our planned Global Solidarity Conference there in April.  Once we have spoken to them we should have some more news.