Is there any particular reason that we still provide free content on X other than sentimentality of what it used to be?
It wasn’t a great place in the past few years before the acquisition, but it’s mostly downhill afterwards and I am questioning why we should provide content for it given its current disposition.
I don’t understand it either. def considering that GNOME already has Fedi/mastodon presence: GNOME (@gnome@floss.social) - FLOSS.social
Could it possibly be because X has a LOT of people from all walks of life on there? And GNOME needs eyeballs that translate to funding or other forms of contribution?
I’m a genius aren’t I?!
Mainly because of reach, and because you probably don’t want to leave the account free. Also, the Engagement team, which is responsible for social media accounts among other things, is very much understaffed at the moment.
You may want to follow the topic about establishing a “comms team”: Reviving the volunteer Engagement Team
No you definitely do not want to delete the account, because it would get snatched up in an instance. Thanks for the link 
Sure, we can say “we need that reach”, but how big is it really lately anyway with the even more broken timeline that is dominated by completely weird advertisements and porn spam.
We could also argue “let’s be a light in that huge pile of crap”, but see above. How much can we still shine in that algorithmic thicket
And this might be my opinion, but I am by no means alone in the world. And I do want to argue that as an inclusive community we try to be, presenting ourselves on the platform that is now in control of some people who are the complete opposite of that, might also not too helpful. So imho if we stay, we should have good reasoning why.
I haven’t been using much of x_twitter lately, so I might be missing something here.
But from what I see, RedHat, SUSE, Canonical etc are still actively using the platform. If there is a serious ethical issue, I guess they’ll be the first ones to jump ship, which they haven’t.
While there may be concerns which needs to be tackled in the platform (more engagement and monitoring as mentioned above), I don’t see any immediate reason demanding strong action (e.g. disabling etc). I think we should try to make x_twitter work for our benefit.
One thing to mention is that usually the amount of actual interactions with posts tends to be much higher on mastodon and such than twitter. I see it happen time and time again.
So even accounts have have 100x more followers on their twitter accounts get 5x more actual engagement on mastodon.
That’s probably because x_twitter needs more engagement and moderation, which is currently in the works.
I’ve been a regular GNOME contributor, but I haven’t visited mastodon. Discourse, matrix, Planet GNOME, reddit, twitter, YouTube is already too much (at least for me). I wouldn’t want another new social media handle to login to. It gets tiring beyond a point.
I don’t mean gnome in particular. I just mean in general.
In general: org’s that make accounts on mastodon get more engagement than on twitter.
Keep the gnome account on X/Twitter as a placeholder. I dont think we need to engage at all on X.
There are other alternatives like bluesky that a number of people have jumped ship to.
We don’t have a good reason to be on Twitter anymore. I’ve talked to the executive committee about it, and we’re going to stop using it going forward. We’ll keep the old account as a placeholder so it doesn’t get used by someone else.
I noticed a sudden influx of unknown spam followers (bots?) in my X/Twitter account last week, which I had to manually delete one by one couple of days ago. So, I agree it’s a good idea to explore alternatives as suggested above.
From a quick search, Mastodon is currently not very encouraging:
while BlueSky (suggested by Sri) looks promising:
Mastodon is not doing well because it is not inherently a twitter experience. Some things like reposts and the like are not there.
But there is also a cultural problem of gatekeeping where mastodon users scold newcomers. We saw this quite often after the third wave of mastodon of migrations. Eugen and others are slow to take feedback about safety and thus people are moving to Bluesky.
That said, Bluesky has been getting a lot of funding from crypto companies so they can afford to have a full on development team where Mastodon is really just a 2-3 people.
I would recommend we use Bluesky even though a lot of our FOSS community are on mastodon. But it is a great way to get exposure while there is a wave of new people coming in especially if they are looking to escape the creepiness of Twitter, we can also provide them other ways to feel safe.
I made an effort signing up at 'floss.social' and received a 'reached capacity' message.
I’ll retry with a different server at some point, but it’s confusing for new users to understand how Mastodon / Fediverse works in general, who are used to signup with OATH within seconds.
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