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 <aalik...@wikimedia.org> 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 <l...@lu.is> wrote: > >> On Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 12:29 AM Kunal Mehta <lego...@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. >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines >> at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l >> Public archives at >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/43SSCVBPGSSLERCFMRZME542UGN4KDJM/ >> To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org > > > > > -- *Anusha Alikhan* Chief Communications Officer Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/message/A2STMXTA3BKPO2VYWX6SEUWEJQOB477Y/ To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-le...@lists.wikimedia.org
