Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #403: Creation of the mastodon account

@x3mboy filed Fedora-Council/tickets ticket #403. Discuss here and record votes and decisions in the ticket.

Ticket text:

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(I closed the ticket for now since there’s no action to take. We’ll discuss here and can reopen later).

Should is a strong word for me. Could we? Absolutely.

My experience with the Fediverse is limited, but in my experience with the SeaGL conference, the Mastodon audience is about 10% of the Twitter audience. Arguably, as a FOSS conference, the folks on Mastodon are our target audience. Yet our engagement is at least proportionally lower than on Twitter. And as best I can tell, about half of the people who engage with the account on Mastodon also are active on Twitter. So for the effort I put in, we reach ones of people that we wouldn’t have otherwise.

To my knowledge, there’s no Tweetdeck equivalent for Mastodon. That’s not a hard requirement, but it does make life a lot easier because it allows us to delegate access instead of sharing credentials. Honestly, if we have to rely on sharing credentials for any new platform, it will take a lot to convince me that it’s an appropriate tool for us to use in 2022.

But all of the above isn’t to say that we shouldn’t. The question is really is this valuable?

Maintaining an additional channel isn’t free—the time our contributors give us is the most valuable resource we have. So it would help to know what we want to accomplish with this and how a Mastodon account would be better than another approach. (“Having a presence on Mastodon” is not a what, it’s a how.)

As far as I know, we don’t have an official tool for this. It’d be cool to have Bitwarden or the like run by CPE or OSPO. That’s something we can look at.

As I said above, if we have to manually share credentials, I’m going to need a lot of convincing.

I have no opinion on this. I trust the Marketing team to pick a suitable instance.

I’m sorry, I did a mistake on the workflow, my intention was to discuss here and use the ticket at the end.

I think it is. Fedora is a great distribution, we are all proud of our work in the FOSS world, we innovate and we push things forward, there is no doubt on that, but we have been always target of hardcore free software advocates (not Open Source, but Free Software). One of the things that was very commented on the FedoraShareYourScreen Announcement was about why to use private/proprietary platforms and it doesn’t hurt to have an account in the fediverse.

Like I said, we can reach that part of the FOSS community that prefer a free platform and in my end, every user counts.

Of course it’s not. We have several contributors raising the hand to help and the plan is to have it as part of the Marketing responsability.

We will.

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I think the question about how we would manage the credentials is important. How do we manage this for other social media accounts that Fedora runs? If they’re also run a little more haphazardly than we would like, Bitwarden could be a good option from what I know.

Maybe a good approach to exploring a Mastodon account could start with a proposal of how we as the marketing team plan on using the account.

If it’s just to be an official feed for the kinds of articles posted on the Twitter account, that could be simple enough to do with a bot, but the question of how worth it that would be is subjective and depends on the expectations we have.

If the goal is to be active in the community and not just act as an RSS feed, maybe we should be put together a schedule or some kind of structure that shows exactly how we would actively manage this account/community. Maybe we can outline what the cadence would look like? In this regard, if whoever currently runs the Twitter could give insight into how they do it, it could be a matter of lifting that process and “signing people up” internally who would commit to that strategy.

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I know at least Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube allow delegation to accounts. So while I have access to all three of those platforms, I don’t have Fedora’s credentials. I use my own creds.

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Hey @x3mboy & @joseph - I think opening a mastodon account for Fedora could have some benefits and if there are a group of people really excited about it, I think that is what it takes to make it a success :slight_smile: I have read through most of the associated threads and seen a handful of reasons why people are not on Twitter or plan to be, but I do have the same concern as Ben- it seems like a lot of effort for a much smaller audience than Twitter.

The Fedora twitter activity is not that well structured, tbh. There was a proposal/thread about how to run things but it didn’t get much further than that, afaik. From my observations its currently used by myself to promote Fedora events/projects, sometimes we get a commblog or magazine post up, retweets of community posts, and people come to the Mindshare Committee/myself sporadically to propose a tweet to be published/retweeted. I think Ben and Matthew do some replying from the account when they are able.

It would be cool if we could merge the efforts for both the Twitter account and the proposed Mastodon account, imo. From what I understand they work in a similar way (I am not on mastodon), so hopefully we could easily sync posts. Ya’ll could start with the proposed twitter strategy as a base for a new docs page for both strategy and cadence that would work for both accounts?

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Personally, I’m fine with redirecting energy to Twitter and other platforms especially from the perspective of outlining a “content pipeline” of sorts. In my mind, Twitter, Facebook, and maybe Mastodon at some point in the future are just channels through which we’re pushing out cool things.

With my previous post I was trying to see what could work to address concerns/interests from both sides, but like I said I think Mastodon would still be only a piece of a larger online marketing presence.

I’ll work on creating the documentation based on that proposed SOP. :slight_smile:

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