On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:29?AM Kunal Mehta <legoktm@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.
> 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.