Date: Tue, 29 Dec 2015 18:48:14
From: Donald Norwood <dnorwood@portalus.com>
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: is twitter useful for debian?
Hi Michael,
On 12/28/2015 06:48 AM, Michael Fothergill wrote:
?Dear Folks,
I don't use twitter much. But I noticed that debian is on twitter
ie The Debian Project <https://twitter.com/debian> @debian. ?
What benefit is there in that?
I tried tweeting a bit on twitter but I did not get much response. So
I got bored with it.
Some exchanges on twitter can be interesting but with the 140
character limit it would not be easy to discuss bugs etc.
Apparently 71% of postings on twitter are ignored. That is not very
interactive.
Comments appreciated.
Regards
Michael Fothergill
Although you can find Debian accounts on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, et
al, the
Debian Project does not endorse the use of those services as their TOS
are not
in line with our beliefs as they are non-free, that being said, none of
those
accounts are 'official' as in recognized by the project.
For those services and others, individuals within Debian have set up
accounts
that reference Debian in order to pass information from the project
directly to
the world.
While not specific to Twitter there are a few benefits to having those
secondary
social media accounts:
They generally have a large user base of people who use them, a fair
amount of
our own developers use them, and people who like to stay abreast of
technology
and software use them. Let us not forget that within the realm of social
media
it has become expected that people or organizations have a presence on
those
social platforms.
The people in charge of twitter do not use Twitter for 2-way
communication, only
for announcements and to highlight events or happenings in the F/OSS
community.
Bear in mind that each one of the non-official accounts is handled by a
third
party and each of them may choose to do things in a different manner.
Our official social media account is on Identi.ca[1] server within the
pump.io
social network, our official blog is 'Bits from Debian[2]', and our
official
newsletter is the Debian Project News (DPN)[3]. Major announcements are
posted
to the debian-announce mailing list[4].
Generally as information is shared from the Debian Project it will
trickle onto those
sources, from there those with the unofficial accounts may as well pass the
information along.
[1]https://identi.ca/debian
[2]https://bits.debian.org/
[3]https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/
[4]https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/debian-announce
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your support and for using Debian!
Best regards,
Donald Norwood
-Debian Publicity Team