Reddit is quite good for engagement. As a mod, we have 94k subscribers. It’s good to place to look at demographics of your audience. The sub is a mix of various types of people.
Largely toxicity is at a low because there are enough commenters who understand GNOME’s design philosophy to engage that moderation is pretty sane vs say back in 2013 or 2014 where it was pretty grim.
Plus, BrageFuglseth has done an amazing job since becoming a mod with a furious amount of content and engagement.
Twitter/X. We need to start winding it down there. I’m of the opinion that we are supporting a nazi site and it’s against our values.
Regarding a comms team - you don’t really have an infrastructure to do this. A comms team needs to be plugged into GNOME development. Before a comms team, you need to create an information pipeline. So in Gitlab, you need to at least highlight something you want the comms team to talk about - most contributors are already overworked and asking them to also think about what to highlight is a difficult task IMHO.
I was once on a marketing team at Intel, and my job was to highlight our successes in open source using infographics and the like. We could do all kinds of interesting comms that generate response based on metrics. Quick little infographics that highlights how the project is doing and what it is investing in that kind of thing. That avoids trying to overly talk with maintainers trying to get something to talk about or depending on them to tell you something.
I’ve been in the engagement team from the beginning, so I’ve seen all the permutations and I also understand how our resources work. You aren’t going to get good comms without investment from the technical contributors and we need to solve that first.