I believe that now is a good time to move forward with this, especially since we will soon have some communication to make on social media.

Do we want to have a Wikimedia Tech account?

FYI, the Wikidata account (community account managed by WMDE staff) is hosted on wikis.world: https://wikis.world/@wikidata

• Sort out syncing with Twitter

Running https://github.com/klausi/mastodon-twitter-sync from Toolforge would be one way that we could announce things to both microblogging platforms. It would feel more "open" to me if we did that by using Mastodon as the primary account and Twitter as the mirror.

Crossposting tools I have seen mentioned a few times were https://crossposter.masto.donte.com.br/ and https://moa.party/

We discussed this in the Developer Advocacy team meeting and decided we want to look into setting up a Mastodon account and crosspost to Twitter from there for now.

We've got two action items: 1) to investigate what the different Mastodon options are and 2) to checkin with Comms. I've updated the task description accordingly.

I am proposing that we use "wikimediatech" as the account name, start on the https://wikis.world/ host, and that posts to the Mastodon account are made directly there rather than mirrored from Twitter.

We could try reposting to Twitter from Mastodon, but this may not be possible long term due to various threats/promises from Twitter to close off their API to all bots.

I am in the idea of creating a wikimediatech account at wikis.world as long as we know how we will continue to post the same stuff on Twitter until that platform exists, as we still have a large following there. I hope reposting is still available as a temporary solution and even if not, we can still manually copy/paste stuff.

To summarize, the open question here is that Twitter was often understood as a broadcast medium, while Mastodon communities seem to expect more active engagement. Which we may not have sufficient capacity for.

In T236397#8619844, @srishakatux wrote:

I am in the idea of creating a wikimediatech account at wikis.world as long as we know how we will continue to post the same stuff on Twitter until that platform exists, as we still have a large following there. I hope reposting is still available as a temporary solution and even if not, we can still manually copy/paste stuff.

I feel strongly that it is more inline with the values of the Wikimedia movement for us to choose to use an open and free platform (Mastodon) over a walled garden (Twitter). To this end I believe that we should make an active decision to sunset our Twitter account. We can certainly choose to provide an extended period where we re-post content originally created for our Mastodon feed to Twitter. I think we must however do so knowing that we are participating in creating content for a platform that is actively choosing to perform less moderation and harm reduction in pursuit of some supposed "free speech" goal which has by this point been shown to be the unprofessional whims of its billionaire owner.

In T236397#8624946, @Aklapper wrote:

To summarize, the open question here is that Twitter was often understood as a broadcast medium, while Mastodon communities seem to expect more active engagement. Which we may not have sufficient capacity for.

I really think the "active engagement" is being overstated. For many, many organizations Twitter was an interactive support medium as well, but that did not prevent us from ignoring that aspect of the platform. There are Mastodon instances with local rules about automated posting, but that is also not something that we have traditionally done with our Twitter presence either. Instead we have used Twitter as a "microblog" where we publish information under a well known URL with various watch mechanisms for interested parties. That's what this task proposes we start doing on Mastodon primarily because a non-trivial amount of our target audience of Wikimedia technical contributors either have entirely or are in the process of exchanging Twitter activity for Fediverse activity.

In T236397#8625867, @bd808 wrote:

I feel strongly that it is more inline with the values of the Wikimedia movement for us to choose to use an open and free platform (Mastodon) over a walled garden (Twitter). To this end I believe that we should make an active decision to sunset our Twitter account. We can certainly choose to provide an extended period where we re-post content originally created for our Mastodon feed to Twitter. I think we must however do so knowing that we are participating in creating content for a platform that is actively choosing to perform less moderation and harm reduction in pursuit of some supposed "free speech" goal which has by this point been shown to be the unprofessional whims of its billionaire owner.

Yes, totally agree! At the same time I resonate w/ the argument that FSF has made here in this post around why they are on twitter "We are there so that people new to the free software movement can learn about it" and also later in their post share "several free software Twitter clients that can be used to view and post tweets without visiting the site or running its proprietary code.": https://www.fsf.org/twitter. I wonder if we could also rely on free software clients like they are referring to.

Just a note that in T323837 https://wikis.world/@mediawiki was created and is documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Mastodon

It seems that this task will get superseded by T337586: add wikimedia.social to WMF DNS (was: Update DNS records for mastodon.wikimedia.org).