That sounds doable via the OAuth2 support, but the bot/CI approach above seems good, too.
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Hi
Wordpress has an ActivityPub plugin. We have a paid and supported WP instance. Could we not just use that plugin to post to a Fedora Mastodon account we set up? And credentials could be held / stored by Fedora infra and unneeded by those posting the content since itâd be the same flow for posting to the Community Blog (or Magazine, or both.)
No this doesnt get us the ability to respond from the account. But it at least establishes a presence and individual Fedorans can respond as themselves if theyâd like. We donât need âFedoraâ having arguments with Kentucky Fried Chicken the way brands âengageâ on Twitter
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also we can host own mastodon with a subdomain like @fedora@social.fedoraproject.org and it can be done on a same server that askfedora and discussion is on it can be deployed in a docker also.
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fedora getting late here it need to open a mastodon asap.
and seems like mastodon have better engagement
https://social.anoxinon.de/@Codeberg/109433975495926437
even @mattdm is on @mattdm@fosatodon.org
signal Signal (@signalapp@mastodon.world) - Mastodon
I donât know how the Wordpress plugin works; it may have the posts show up from @fedoramagazine.com or whatnot.
It seems like we have two main options to choose from (three if you squint).
If we want to be able to post AND engage through the Mastodon account, then we need use the Bitwarden or Authentic8 method of somehow sharing access to the account. Iâm not sure how Authentic8 would work, but with Bitwarden it would require sharing the password with all the people who would post. As far as I can tell, this is within the scope of what the Marketing Team can pull off.
If we really donât want to share credentials for whatever reason, then we would need to implement one of the several technical solutions, whether it be with a CI job, a bot, something with APIs, or using some kind of plugin. The tradeoff is that weâre only pushing out posts and would not be engaging with the community unless we have the person with the credentials occasionally responding to people. Also, I think I can speak for the Marketing Team in saying that we donât have the know-how for this, so someone technical would have to help us with this.
The third option is to straight up just have the Fedora account be a bot account that copies whatever is posted from the Fedora Twitter account. If we go down the route of a technical solution where there will be little to no engagement, then from Marketingâs perspective weâd be posting the same thing to Mastodon as we would to Twitter. In that case, we may as well just have the Mastodon account copy posts from Twitter and call it a day.
So the question becomes, do we want engagement from the Fedora account or just a bot account? I know some of us donât mind just having a bot account, but others have expressed the idea that without engaging with the community we wouldnât be doing it right.
Another point that could be worth getting clarification on is how we determine who gets access to important credentials within the Fedora Project. It could be that we have enough trusted people now where sharing the password between them is feasible if not as clean as using TweetDeck on Twitter.
Lastly, I hate to ping but I know that @bcotton has expressed hesitancy over making a Mastodon account. Your input at this point in the discussion would be helpful for getting direction.
I have the know how to set up the activitypub plugin. Also note the ActivityPub plugin is platform agnostic - it works beyond mastodon so people on non mastodon AP networks could follow. So the idea of engaging back is a twitter centric model⊠activitypub is more like bringing rss back. If we want to engage back, self identified fedorans on each platform (peertube, mastodon, pixelfed, what not) can engage as individuals. Fedora engaging as a person when it is not is a twitterism I am not sure is worth keeping.
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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 â 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 itâs 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 âvoice of the brandâ approach became popular on Twitter. Thereâs 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. Iâm not sure if that is bi-directional, though. If it were, that could be a way to, if we so desire, make replies as âfedoraâ.
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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 donât 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 donât 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 youâve 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 wouldnât normally talk about Fedora that much, but then they see that thereâs 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 thatâs it. Thatâs certainly what some folks will be looking for, but if youâre used to seeing other Linux distros engage back with their communities while Fedora doesnât, 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. Iâm not saying we canât 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, Iâm 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 Iâm thinking of later!
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No less engagement than weâre 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 donât think weâll 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 itâs 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 weâre 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 thatâs just not a problem anymore as long as we have only trusted people with access, then I think weâre 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 itâs there to be followed.
Thanks for all the enthusiasm!
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Now all thatâs 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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Itâs a big win for @frankjunior 
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. Itâs our homework so that the experimental (though official) account will keep going on Mastodon.
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