Hi All:
Following on from my last message in this thread, we are aiming to provide
a more solid update on talks about Mastodon in the next few weeks. This has
been an ongoing discussion among several Foundation teams and was also a
topic of conversation in our meeting with ComCom [1] in February.
The Foundation Communications department sees social media platforms as
places that should have many Wikimedia accounts with a view to goals and
audiences. They are huge tools for outreach, organizing, and communicating
values. There are currently many volunteer- and affiliate-led social media
accounts working alongside Foundation-guided accounts, providing us all
with a networked ability to share and localize content to advance specific
goals with different audiences. We believe in this wide, collaborative
model. Thank you.
Anusha
[1]
On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:29 AM Kunal Mehta
<legoktm(a)debian.org> wrote:
Hi,
On 4/7/23 18:17, Dan Szymborski wrote:
It doesn't make sense to even talk about
actually getting
involved without discussing *which* of the multitude of Mastodon
instances to "join," <snip> 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.
To be clear, this discussion started in December, which has been more
than enough time for our friends and allies at Mozilla, Creative
Commons, Internet Archive, OpenStreetMap and plenty more to set up their
Mastodon presences. There's no excuse for the WMF to not have figured
out which server to sign up on
With no offense to any of those groups (almost all of whom I have some
past or present affiliation with), WMF has a professional Twitter presence
with more followers than all of those organizations combined, and with
substantial donor mindshare and revenue attached to that presence (almost
certainly more than all of those orgs combined, though harder to know for
certain). The much better comparison is the large media organizations — who
are also all struggling with this challenge.
[As just one example of the challenge, NPR was (incorrectly) rumored to
have showed up on press.coop last night and... the server has been down
or inaccessibly slow pretty much since then. And it wasn't even true!]
I do think that WMF should have a presence on federated media, and I hope
they're working with Wordpress (who power diff) to implement it. But
Wordpress is still labeling their ActivityPub plugin as beta, so no
surprise that they aren't rolling it out yet to their biggest
customers—like WMF.
There's a case to be made that WMF should not act like a guardian of a
global brand—as Depths of Wikipedia has been reminding us all of late, many
people love Wikipedia's weird, rough edges, so the standard global brand
toolkit may not be a good fit for us. But any discussion of "move fast,
maybe break the brand" has to start from that — what is the brand? what is
the risk of playing fast and loose with it? what are the "right" kids of
risk to take with it? It'd be irresponsible to plunge ahead before having
that discussion.
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