There is some discussion of crossposting tools at T236397. @bd808 may be able to provide more details.

@CKoerner_WMF - I heard you might be the person with the WMF Twitter keys, so would love to know your thoughts.

I think this suggestion is well-intentioned, but I'm not a fan of mirrored accounts. Wikimedia should have an official presence in the Fediverse (some projects and affiliates already do!), but it should not be a straight up mirror of Twitter, the posting and social conventions are very different IMO.

@Legoktm - That's a good point. For example, Mastodon expects posts to use content warnings and image descriptions for better safety and accessibility. I know Wikidata moved over to your wikis.world server recently. I wonder what their approach is.

@Lydia_Pintscher, @Masssly - What is your approach to posting to both Twitter and Mastodon? Do you mostly crosspost, and if so, do you customize the posts for each platform? Why did you choose that approach?

In T323837#8422700, @kaldari wrote:

@Legoktm - That's a good point. For example, Mastodon expects posts to use content warnings and image descriptions for better safety and accessibility. I know Wikidata moved over to your wikis.world server recently. I wonder what their approach is.

@Lydia_Pintscher, @Masssly - What is your approach to posting to both Twitter and Mastodon? Do you mostly crosspost, and if so, do you customize the posts for each platform? Why did you choose that approach?

We do it by hand among others because the tool we used in the past for cross-posting to other networks (Buffer) doesn't support Mastodon. We don't have too much experience yet with how much adapting the posts will need for the platform. But I think what's more important is not what we post but engaging on the platforms with what others are doing. On both Twitter and Mastodon we do follow what others are talking about around Wikidata and retweet/repost and like or engage in discussions where appropriate. I guess you can't get that from simply mirroring the accounts unfortunately.

And yes we do post almost everything to all our social media accounts that we share (announcements, weekly summaries, ...).

In T323837#8422014, @kaldari wrote:

There is some discussion of crossposting tools at T236397. @bd808 may be able to provide more details.

In T323837#8422443, @Legoktm wrote:

I think this suggestion is well-intentioned, but I'm not a fan of mirrored accounts. Wikimedia should have an official presence in the Fediverse (some projects and affiliates already do!), but it should not be a straight up mirror of Twitter, the posting and social conventions are very different IMO.

For what it is worth, I would personally be mostly interested in using the fediverse account as the "primary" and mirroring posts made there to Twitter if we decide not to shutdown the Twitter account entirely. Operating in the other direction (using Twitter as a primary content stream) would to me be, as @Legoktm mentions, a mismatch of platform conventions.

In T323837#8422705, @Lydia_Pintscher wrote:

We do it by hand among others because the tool we used in the past for cross-posting to other networks (Buffer) doesn't support Mastodon.

FWIW I've heard that Buffer is considering adding Mastodon support.

Hi @Lookd_Up. Can you please use a WMF created account to comment, as it's otherwise impossible to verify statements (impersonation etc)? Also, if there are resources, then could you please share relevant links here for Developer-Advocacy? (This task is public, however officewiki and Google Docs [can] have access restrictions.) Thanks a lot!

Hi @kaldari and @Aklapper: I am re-sharing my comment from a WMF account, as requested: @CKoerner_WMF kindly shared this task with me. My team at the Foundation is responsible for managing the Foundation and English Wikipedia social media channels, so we care about this conversation and would need to be involved in any decisions around the public presence of these brands on other platforms. We have also been closely following the situation with Twitter and exploring Mastodon. In fact, we have developed an overview of our findings and recommendations as an internal staff resource that I can share with you. To continue this conversation, could you please reach out to talktocomms@wikimedia.org with your request(s) (to ensure Department visibility), and I will follow up there? Thank you! - Lauren Dickinson
...
In a follow up to your comment: The resource that we created is intended as a resource for Foundation staff (it is not public). If there are aspects of the document that you think would be useful to share with a wider audience, let's discuss. Can you please email talktocomms@wikimedia.org with the specifics of what you are interested in? Thanks!

Thank you!

@LDickinsonWMF - Thanks for sharing that information! I'm glad to hear that the WMF is exploring the use of Mastodon and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

Possibly of interest to folks exploring a Wikimedia fediverse presence:

https://meedan.com/event/webinar-trust-and-safety-on-the-fediverse

Darius Kazemi is generally one of the most trustworthy voices in the space, and specifically posted this with:

If you work at an organization for public benefit and have thought "I wish more people here knew what was going on in the fediverse" ... you should pass this on to them!

I just want to second @brennen's suggestion – Darius is the author of https://runyourown.social (a great overview of the Fediverse as well as a manifesto for community-driven technology). If WMF is considering getting more involved in this space, I think this presentation might be of great interest.

I think that the spirit of the Fediverse has much in common with our own movement and it would great to see more connection between these two communities.

@LDickinsonWMF: Thanks. I would prefer to keep things in one place and a Phab comment seems more efficient (and discoverable) than dealing with separate individual email requests for information from teams? If there is an officewiki staff resource (or a staff restricted Google Doc), would you please share its URL so staff teams that would like to evaluate the situation could access this resource? (I had searched officewiki but haven't been successful.) Thanks a lot in advance!

Based on the reply in T323837#8442502, I don't think waiting for the WMF to catch up is necessary. Most Wikimedia social media accounts aren't run by the WMF anyways, (c.f. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Microblogging_handles#Projects). I think we should go ahead and create some accounts for projects we're involved in, make it clear who's running them, and start posting in a collaborative manner. They won't have an "official" verified checkmark, but that's fine to start with.

Adding this here, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer for those of us not on the legal team and who may not be aware of the legal issues involved in hosting one's own instance of Mastodon. Some thought would need to go into managing trust and safety issues as well, in particular if the instance is open to use by community members and not just WMF employees.

I share others' concerns about the future of Twitter, and it's great that we are discussing alternatives now.

Hi all! I am back here to clear up any confusion around my earlier comment, as I saw the note from @Legoktm on Wikimedia-l. The document I am referencing includes an exploration of Mastodon's outreach value for engaging public audiences and is drafted purely from that lens. It does not take a position on the technical side, which is not my expertise, or address the issue of the Foundation setting up an instance. It is intended to help staff better understand Mastodon in the context of their goals to reach key audiences. Our social media accounts are primarily used to advance our movement goals such as pushing better understanding of Wikipedia, getting people to join community initiatives like edit-a-thons, and sharing things like the winners of Wiki Loves Earth. They are also an important avenue to invite new people to engage with our movement. We did some exploring to determine the current ability of Mastodon to help us with these goals. We are constantly reviewing with new information so we can update and respond to a regularly evolving situation. My offer is still open to engage on this outreach piece via email (talktocomms@wikimedia.org), so please feel free to reach out.

Sorry to say this as a critical feedback to @LDickinsonWMF (maybe you are not in a resource managment position) but how can a cost of WMF's US based staff doing stealth : exploration and constantly reviewing situation... compare to cost of any WMF contractor just setting up mirroring of a Mastodon account for WMF tweets? (even if it does not get huge amount of shares, it would at least help advance the situation) Hope you can consider this in early 2023 at least for the benefit of (high and low) key contributors to Wikimedia ;-)

In T323837#8486879, @LDickinsonWMF wrote:

Hi all! I am back here to clear up any confusion around my earlier comment, as I saw the note from @Legoktm on Wikimedia-l. The document I am referencing includes an exploration of Mastodon's outreach value for engaging public audiences and is drafted purely from that lens. It does not take a position on the technical side, which is not my expertise, or address the issue of the Foundation setting up an instance. It is intended to help staff better understand Mastodon in the context of their goals to reach key audiences. Our social media accounts are primarily used to advance our movement goals such as pushing better understanding of Wikipedia, getting people to join community initiatives like edit-a-thons, and sharing things like the winners of Wiki Loves Earth. They are also an important avenue to invite new people to engage with our movement. We did some exploring to determine the current ability of Mastodon to help us with these goals. We are constantly reviewing with new information so we can update and respond to a regularly evolving situation. My offer is still open to engage on this outreach piece via email (talktocomms@wikimedia.org), so please feel free to reach out.

How is it possible to even "engage" if we cannot access said document? Reading your summary of it at face value, it's entirely unclear why it needs to be private and why community members are being excluded from this conversation.

@LDickinsonWMF Thank you for commenting here and for letting us know that some discussion of Mastodon/fediverse has happened. If the assessment of Mastodon specifically is focused on such sensitive matters that it cannot be publicly shared, perhaps you can share here the publicly available guidance it was based on? For example, some orgs have a social media policy, or an annual plan for communications (I didn't check whether WMF has either). People could then start understanding better your thinking process.

To start from a very high level, it seems clear to me that the current setup doesn't align with the Wikimedia Foundation mission or the Wikimedia values or the WMF staff values of 2016 (people who value free knowledge, free software and privacy are currently left out by WMF microblogging). So it would be good to know whether these were incorporated in the mentioned document, just to know how big of a gap needs to bridged in communication on the matter.

@Legoktm - Given that the WMF has no interest in using Mastodon (judging from @LDickinsonWMF's comments and lack of engagement here), I agree that it would make sense for the community to move ahead on this without official WMF support. Do you know anyone in the community (yourself included) that might be interested in such a job? Maybe someone at one of the chapters?

people who value free knowledge, free software and privacy are currently left out by WMF microblogging

This is an important point. The very people who already share the WMF's values (and thus would never use Facebook or Twitter), will never see a social media post by the WMF. It might seem like that demographic is too small to matter, but I imagine it overlaps significantly with the demographic of people who would think writing encyclopedia articles in their free time is fun.

@kaldari: I don't think that comment summarizes it well. Maybe the WMF Communications department currently does not plan to further investigate using Mastodon (and usually does not use Phabricator as an engagement venue AFAIK), however other WMF departments or teams might.

Hi @kaldari: A response from the Foundation was shared on this in January via Wikimedia-l (here is the archived message). Discussions about the Foundation's presence on Mastodon are ongoing. We invite you to share thoughts and questions on our talk page.

In T323837#8683820, @Aklapper wrote:

...however other WMF departments or teams might.

But have they? If not, what's stopping them?

In T323837#8683778, @kaldari wrote:

@Legoktm - Given that the WMF has no interest in using Mastodon (judging from @LDickinsonWMF's comments and lack of engagement here), I agree that it would make sense for the community to move ahead on this without official WMF support. Do you know anyone in the community (yourself included) that might be interested in such a job? Maybe someone at one of the chapters?

I'm happy to take the lead on setting up accounts for projects I am involved with (MediaWiki, English Wikipedia, Wikitech), but I can't sustain them by myself. But I'm sure we (generally speaking, not specifically you) can figure out some way to share the workload once we get started.

Created https://wikis.world/@mediawiki and documented at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Mastodon - please boost :)

https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/110189029188205820 now exists, documented as community-run with guidelines on how to contribute at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/@Wikipedia.

I think we can close this task as declined now? We didn't set up mirrors, but the goal of the task was mostly accomplished in spirit in that we now have community-run MediaWiki and Wikipedia accounts on the Fediverse. (There is still room for creating a community-run @Wikimedia account if someone wants to - happy to help coordinate).