Mastodon is not really a centralized social network in any meaningful way, any more than "joining IRC" is. It's a bunch of individual servers, and participating in that kind of environment isn't just signing up for an account. It doesn't make sense to even talk about actually getting involved without discussing *which* of the multitude of Mastodon instances to "join," whether WMF should start its own WMF-themed instance, and whether the reach from the instances are sufficient to be worth the trouble, or other things first. There's a lot of legwork to be done first, as opposed to the simpler task of signing up for, say, an alternative of similar construction, like Spoutible.

Dan

On Tue, Apr 4, 2023 at 3:24 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
You may know the concern I have with this topic. Now, that we can see Twitter adding a Dogecoin icon in order to push a fraudulent pyramidal scheme and how the verified accounts won't be relevant anymore if they don't pay is a good moment to do two movements: joining Mastodon and bulding a new communications scheme where diversity, content and the community is in the center. We know that the word for crisis is not opportunity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_"crisis"), but, indeed, we are seing how the Titanic sinks and we have a good opportunity to move away and start to build good practices.

As always, some volunteers will be here to help in this travel.

Galder
From: Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2023 7:23 AM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge
 
The latest announcement from Twitter is that the site is going fully
pay-to-play -- to be in recommendation feeds or even vote in polls,
you will need to be a subscriber. [1] While it remains to be seen
whether the site will follow through, these plans are consistent with
the relentless promotion of a subscription-based model under the
company's current leadership.

While new alternatives are launching every month, Mastodon remains the
primary place folks are migrating to. This Dewey Square report is a
good read on recent developments, including the Mozilla Mastodon
instance, the Medium.com one (which is rapidly closing in on 10K
users), and the Flipboard one.
https://www.deweysquare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/DSG-Snapshot-of-the-Twitter-Migration-March-2023.pdf

Being open source and community-based, Mastodon should be a perfect
fit for Wikimedia, and I still very much hope that Wikimedia
Foundation will set up an official presence in the fediverse, much
like many chapters/affiliates already have.

Warmly,
Erik

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/27/23659351/elon-musk-twitter-for-you-verified-accounts-polls
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