Is this a plant, animal or fungi?And so it went in this case, where Dr. Vonshak, an ecologist, first thought the photograph taken at California’s Joshua Tree National Park in 2016 might be of a cluster of amphibian eggs.But in a moment that can feel like everything is subject to dispute — the cause of inflation, the nature of gender, the legitimacy of an election — iNaturalist has also gained recognition as a rare place on the internet where people with different points of view manage to forge agreement on what constitutes reality.“Here you have a site where people are trying, together, to collectively establish what’s true,” said Jevin West, a data scientist at the University of Washington who studies methods to combat misinformation on social networks.And iNaturalist is far from the only digital community that manages to mostly maintain peace by sticking to a narrow interest: Banjo Hangout for banjo nerds, Front Porch Forum for connecting neighbors in Vermont towns, Mastodon servers for every micro-identity."