Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.
The speed with which it happened prevented users from accessing their data, highlighting the risks of decentralized social media without backups. Its administrator ceased operations, causing confusion and data loss for many healthcare professionals who had signed up as an alternative to Twitter.
This event serves as a reminder: Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!
WARNING: To help Med-mastodon users who have returned to the Fediverse, the Poliverso staff has created the Friendica group @medmastodon
If you follow this group, you can:
- Follow it and mention it in your messages, and it will reshare all your public posts addressed to it (this only applies to an initial message, not a reply to another message).
- Follow it only to read all the messages from fellow doctors who send messages through it.
I’m not sure what people would be trying to access, I suppose. Post history? Things that can be exported, like account settings, generally should be stashed somewhere. Things that can’t be, well… That’s a bit sad but I dunno, I never post anything online that I care so much about I’d be sad if it disappeared. Anything I did care about, I make a backup of it locally.
Not trying to downplay people’s upset, but just pointing out ways to protect the things you care about.