Mailing List Archive

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge
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] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 11:51?AM Luis Villa <luis@lu.is> wrote:

> 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.
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