[Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge

[Anusha A]

Hi All:

I wanted to update you that the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a
Mastodon instance. You can follow us at:
wikimedia.social/@wikimediafoundation.

At the moment, sign-up is open for Wikimedia Foundation staff as we examine
moderation and other areas. Product and technology staff will use it primarily
for developer engagement. The goal is to create a space for people to
connect and talk tech. Several Foundation staff members, including Chief
Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann
<https://wikimedia.social/@selenadeckelmann>, are setting up accounts on
Mastodon to engage with people interested in our work. In addition, we’ll
experiment with posting broader content about the Wikimedia movement and
projects that might be appealing to tech enthusiasts and fans of
open-source platforms. We’ll use these experiments to better understand
Mastodon’s use as an outreach platform. We also know there are other social
media options launching or that have launched (e.g. Threads, Bluesky).  We
are also looking into experimenting with these and will be updating ComCom
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee> on our progress.
Please feel free to reach out to us on our talkpage
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media> with any questions.

Thanks,

Anusha


On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 2:56 PM Anusha A  wrote:

> 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  wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:29 AM Kunal Mehta  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,"  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 

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge

[Anusha A]

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  wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:29 AM Kunal Mehta  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,"  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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[Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge

[Anusha A]

Hi all,

I'm Anusha, VP of Communications at the Foundation. We share everyone’s
concerns on the direction of Twitter and very much agree that values are a
big part of the way we communicate and show up in the world. Over the last
several weeks, we’ve been watching this issue closely. There is a lot to
look at—not just the communications outreach and technical bit of a
presence on Mastodon, but also the legal, social, and safety factors like
the data retention policy for an existing instance, the potential to access
the private messages of accounts, or using Foundation resources for the
tech and social media management of an account, and how this connects to
our vision [1].

We want to be thoughtful and thorough in how we approach these questions
and that takes time. We’re exploring with Foundation teams and we also have
an upcoming meeting with the Communications Committee [2] - this is on the
agenda. That meeting will help provide some valuable input and insights
from community members in addition to what we’ve heard here.

I appreciate the concerns and perspectives shared on this thread and
elsewhere. We’ll update folks on the social media talk page [3] and welcome
more thoughts there. Thank you.

Anusha

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/vision/

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications_committee

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Social_media


On Wed, Jan 4, 2023 at 12:27 PM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> I agree that Wikipedia handles should join Mastodon. But, again, opening a
> social media channel needs a strategy. Currently, there's no strategy for
> the Twitter account, so opening an account in Mastodon without strategy
> would be a bad decision.
>
> (Still waiting the social media team to define their monthly audience,
> really opaque statistics)
>
> Best
>
> Galder
> --
> *From:* The Cunctator 
> *Sent:* Wednesday, January 4, 2023 1:33 AM
> *To:* Antoine Musso 
> *Cc:* Wikimedia Mailing List 
> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Mozilla's social media pledge
>
> No, I'm saying it is opaque who of the 41-member comms department at WMF
> edits Diff. Standard practice even for non-profit publications is for the
> masthead to be public.
>
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2023, 11:34 AM Antoine Musso  wrote:
>
>
> > On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 9:06 PM geni  > > wrote:
> ...
> > It has:
> >
> > https://diff.wikimedia.org/ 
> > ...
> Le 03/01/2023 à 15:32, The Cunctator a écrit :
>  > Pretty amusing that it's incredible opaque who edits it.
>  >
>
> Hello The Cunctator,
>
> I am assuming your reply was asking who can edit Diff. I don't think
> posts are editable in the sense of a Wiki.  Proposing a content on Diff
> is open to anyone as long as it fit in its scope. There are more
> informations at:
>
> * https://diff.wikimedia.org/about/
> * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Diff_(blog)
>
> The blog is managed by the WMF Movement Communications team:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/Movement_Communications
> who will assist in polishing up your draft blog post before it is
> published.
>
> cheers,
>
> --
> Antoine "hashar" Musso
> Wikimedia Release Engineering
>
>
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