Greetings,
This discussion has been in the back of my mind since I decided to
delete my personal accounts on some proprietary platforms, this was
brought up again in the last meeting [1], and I think it warrants
enough of a discussion to bring it to a place where I think the whole
community can engage while taking their time.
Mostly the discussion centres around Debian's existence on Twitter(X),
not only does it exist as a proprietary platform in the face of a FOSS
alternative that is open and decentralised in nature (The fediverse/
Mastodon where we also have a presence), it's policies for moderation
and its leadership structure has caused several "waves" of exodus from
the platform, as from my personal experience I have seen people on the
social margins get pushed off of the platform or be forced to live in
the shadow of this platform not being for them.
Twitter still remains the largest with our platform following, it is
22 fold bigger than our following on the smallest platform (Mastodon),
Though I would weigh outreach to statistics, it remains that for
Debian, and for other Linux distributions, F/OSS projects, and other
projects/volunteer groups, Twitter is still the most accessible
and easiest to account for social media that can be used to easily
spread information and to put the public eye on issues or stories.
A few things I would want everyone to keep in mind, would be:
- Aforementioned migration of users to other platforms
A not insignificant amount of users have decided to move away and the
trend can only be seen to continue with Facebook and its subsidiaries
continuing policies that have caused tension within Twitter, causing
even more of an exodus from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads (which
also federates with the fediverse) Though we are not on these
platforms, this seems to be a general trend in the industry that I
do not think will reverse any time soon.
- Towards other "proprietary" platforms
A lot of the people leaving have headed towards a federated service
running FOSS software, but a lot haven't, with BlueSky so far having
grown a lot, though it purports to be open and federated, it remains
mostly centralised around the main instance on bsky.social. (Though
from my understanding there is progress towards changing this)
- Who is making this decision?
Even though I have a very firm opinion the issue, I am personally for
leaving the decision making to the Publicity team delegates, it is
under their mandate that we joined the platform, I think they are
competent enough as a group to continue to make their decision under
their mandate, though I still believe we should all voice our opinions
here and make sure to discuss the nuances of the work after either
decision is taken, if there is a difference in between the two, as it
has been discussed in the irc channel, we are at a time where FOSDEM
and FOSSASIA provide great platforms for DDs and DCs to come together
and discuss this face to face and air their opinions.
- Leaving, How?
An important part of the discussion if we leave, would be how does
Debian leave, would we simply stop pushing our articles to the
account to allow it to exist as an archive, should we leave with a
statement, one explaining our reasoning? If account deletion, should
we leave "@debian" open for someone to take and use for unofficial
purposes, or leave behind an empty account to reserve the handle?
Nuances yes, but I think these are worth discussing.
I am sure we all have encountered our fair share of incorrect,
purposefully uninformed, misinformed, demeaning, or alarming posts,
decisions, and news from Twitter, and I do not think that will be
changing any time soon, though I do not see the status quo changing
too drastically from any decision, I still believe, while we (I) may
not care much for brand recognition and association, other groups of
other sizes and shapes who do, might care if there was an active
reminder from people and projects leaving for moral reasons, when
they are reminded that who they are being left behind with.
---
While most of this was written at an earlier time, I will interject
and mention a sense of urgency that has developed since the events
of January 20th, where these concerns were raised to a new bar, I
will like for the seriousness of this to be high, and that we should
take decision quickly.
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[1]https://meetbot.debian.net/debian-publicity/2025/debian-
publicity.2025-01-08-16.00.log.html#l-240
Warm Regards,
disaster2life
--
I would like to put a funny signature for this email here but,
this seems way too serious and uptight of an email for me to do that.