Will fedora have a mastodon now

This is a really interesting idea, actually. Our Wordpress hosting is provided by RH OSPO, who has contracted it from a provider, and as I understand from Jason Brooks, the contract allows us to have multiple different instances at little (or no?) additional cost — the constraint is traffic totals for all of them. So, we could perhaps set up an instance meant for editors only, and configure that plugin.

That way, we could provide tailored content for the social media feed, not just re-publish magazine posts (or links to those posts). And posts could be drafted, edited, scheduled, coordinated.

There are some cases where it’s nice to have an official kind of response. But in general I agree that having actual people engage feels more Fedora.

I do see why the “voice of the brand” approach became popular on Twitter. There’s a big difference between being able to put on a (professional, humorous, or whatever) persona as part of official interactions, and not worry about that getting conflated with your own personal thoughts, comments, posts, etc.

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It looks like the plugin has support for fediverse replies becoming wordpress comments. I’m not sure if that is bi-directional, though. If it were, that could be a way to, if we so desire, make replies as “fedora”.

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In that case it could be worthwhile to use this plugin for the Fedora Magazine and Community Blog anyway. It could be a way of making an RSS type of feed more accessible to people who don’t go out of their way to use an RSS reader but would just like links to information in their Mastodon timelines.

However, if we decide to set up a new WP instance to leverage this plugin as a way of pushing out content to an official Fedora account, I would prefer we don’t do that if we can help it.

Twitterism or not, people on the internet have developed expectations for what a brand on social media should be doing.

It could be as bare as sharing links and broadcasting announcements in a one-to-many model of communication.

It could also be about boosting, liking, and replying to threads, which can make community members feel good and want to engage with the brand. Imagine you’ve worked really hard on a cool use of Fedora for your raspberry pi and you happened to use the hashtag. It could feel bonkers to have the Fedora account boost your post. There could be followers who wouldn’t normally talk about Fedora that much, but then they see that there’s an actual person behind the account and now they want to stick around and read threads looking for more from the brand.

You could also see a negative reaction to a lack of engagement as well. People may be less likely to engage with or even follow an account that just posts and that’s it. That’s certainly what some folks will be looking for, but if you’re used to seeing other Linux distros engage back with their communities while Fedora doesn’t, that could be seen as a let down. I gotta wonder how many times folks tag or reply to Fedora in hopes of a reply or mention only to get crickets. As exciting as it can feel to be seen, being ignored could feel equally disappointing.

By not giving ourselves access to the other tools to engage with the community, we hold ourselves back from encouraging discussion about Fedora, leveraging the content others provide, and differentiating our brand and community. I’m not saying we can’t do those things by just posting, but having access to those things could help us do more of what we want.

My ideas surrounding engagement are not urgent, though. Based on the community response, I’m in favor of standing up something quickly and securely to give people an official account they can follow. At that point credentials will exist and we can find a way to do the extra kinds of engagement I’m thinking of later!

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No less engagement than we’re currently getting from not having a presence at all. It is noticeable as RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, Pop!_OS, and others have now been there for a good hot minute. The #Fedora hashtag is used often enough that I don’t think we’ll have to worry much about there being a base to engage with.

I should also point out that Fedora accounts already exist, like fedora (@fedora@mastodon.social) - Mastodon, which is dormant without engagement, which one could argue is preferable to active and hostile, but as it sits, a reasonable Mastodon user might assume that account to be valid and representing this community, as evidenced by it having hundreds of followers despite no posts (and interesting that its only follower is the foreign minister of Iran, a country which is under US embargo).

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At this point it seems like implementing the WP instance with the ActivityPub plugin is our best solution for solving the credential problem. We have lots of people interested from within the project so I think it’s time to just pull the trigger on that option.

What would be the next step in order to make this happen? Would we have to loop in Infra? @duffy since you mentioned knowing how we can use the plugin, do you happen to know where we go next?

@jflory7 Can you check with Jason about what it takes to get another WP instance spun up?

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I am trying to get rapidly up to speed here. The ask is to launch a new WordPress site that is hooked up to ActivityPub with a third-party plugin, so that posts made in WordPress end up as toots on Mastodon? Am I understanding this right?

Was there a reason why sharing a password in Bitwarden was not feasible? I am on board with trying something, but I feel like we are out-engineering ourselves when it would be better to make an account first, get a group of stakeholders on board to help out with maintaining it, and simply share a password for a few months while we get a feel for Mastodon.

Generally, I prefer not to use a third-party client to interact and engage with social media because it often feels indirect and there is a disconnect between platform features and what the third-party platform supports. This is true even with regular Twitter dot com and Tweetdeck.

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If using Bitwarden is on the table and we’re ok with a group of people having access to those credentials, then I am in favor of this idea. The technical solutions were brought up as a way of having an account and giving access to post to it without just giving someone the credentials.

When making a Mastodon account was brought up in June of this year, having a way to share access only was one of the considerations at play. Since there is still no easy way to do that, the problem remains.

But if we decided that’s just not a problem anymore as long as we have only trusted people with access, then I think we’re good to move forward with Bitwarden.

bitwarden is good option i have set my own server with vaultwarden and only share password within a trusted peoples and will solve a lot of issues.

but having wp plugin will help post aome news just on the same time that it released.

After much deliberation, here is the official Fedora Project account on Mastodon!

Created with the blessing of @jflory7, the goal of the account will be to have an official but experimental presence on Mastodon as we continue to figure out how to interact with and benefit our community there. It will be integrated as one of the marketing channels we have available, alongside our Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.

There will still be work to do in terms of how we want to manage access like we have been discussing, but at least this way we have an account, it exists, and it’s there to be followed.

Thanks for all the enthusiasm!

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Now all that’s left is to get the verified checkmark by updating getfedora.org to have the <a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@fedora">Mastodon</a> link in it, preferrably together with the rest of the social media links at the bottom of the page.

We already managed to do that for our Instagram before, all we need is for someone on the websites team to get to it.

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It’s a big win for @frankjunior :tada::tada: and for Fedora itself.

Weeks ago, I had a thought that the official account of Fedora Project will not really benefit this amazing project on the ground that Mastodon has been the house of FOSS supporters. Consequently, I believe that many Mastodon users have known Fedora.

And Twitter migration had soared the users of Mastodon. What I want to say is the newcomers may not be really interested in Linux distros, including Fedora and we need to do more efforts to promote Fedora to other users. The posts in Mastodon will reach the followers, but possibly not reaching the ones not following Fedora.

So I think that we need to get a plan for that now. It’s our homework so that the experimental (though official) account will keep going on Mastodon.

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i think we should remove the experimental tag…

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I added the experimental tag based on Justin’s advice to ease into the platform. Once we’ve been using it for a bit and have other things ironed out like account verification and a final solution for the credentials, that tag will likely go away. It’s just to manage expectations.

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sure let me know if need any help?

Let’s chat more about this at a Marketing Team meeting sometime after the new year. We can find hosted Bitwarden to set up a group for the Fedora Marketing Team to manage credentials.

In an ideal world, we would have all the tools needed to share access and manage credentials on Day One. Since we don’t have that ideal world yet, we can improvise as we figure out the best practices and a strategy or overall approach for how Fedora engages on Mastodon.

we can use vaultwarden which is a rust implementation of bitwarden server api and provide a good experience
garuda team have there vaultdarden set up we can use that else we can set that by our self else bitwarden default is always there. thanks
https://bitwarden.garudalinux.org/#/login

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some websites in getfedora

it need attention

But such account was officially announced somewhere? (I.e. Fedora Magazine or Community blog?)

We posted it here and got the account verified, so it is up and running.

Because we’re still getting our bearings we haven’t announced it on other channels, but that is the plan at some point. Will probably announce on the Comm Blog and established socials. Made a ticket to discuss in the marketing team.

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