Re: [Tails-project] creating a presence of Tails in the fedi…

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Author: syster
Date:  
To: tails-project
Subject: Re: [Tails-project] creating a presence of Tails in the fediverse
>I know next to nothing about the Fediverse so I have a question.
>Is someone able to follow either one of these accounts, or both, using

a single account?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that friendica supports beside ActivityPub, which is the underlying open standard that facilitates the federated communication, also another one that is capable of interacting with diaspora. If you have an account on diaspora, you can't follow the mastodon account, but you can follow the friendica account.
>In other words, do these 2 accounts reach the exact same audience?


Partly is this explained above. Another reason they will never reach the same audience is that every instance has it's very own audience and culture. By how the UI design is people using mastodon tend to engage with local content (content from the instance one is part of) more then people do in friendica. At least that is my experience.
In addition to that, if a person uses a hashtag in a post it is not visible to everyone searching for that hashtag. It is only visable if the instance you're at has fetched this content afaik and that happens if one from your instance followed that person afaik. (it might be that this has changed over the year)
> Our Twitter account is mostly write-only. AFAICT, we rarely

participate in discussions there.

I like that. Mostly for the reason that I don't like twitter. :-p
>One reason is that we lack resources to do more work.


>Another reason is that historically, the project preferred that any
>communication coming from our collective voice was agreed upon by
>the core project members beforehand. The project has changed a lot
>since, and perhaps I am overly cautious, but personally I would not
>dare engaging in non-trivial discussions on Twitter under the
>@Tails_live handle, without significant process clarifications.

I think it's good to stick to this for twitter.
And personally I also would not use the fediverse accounts for non-trivial discussions for the reason that I'm not knowledgeable enough.

But I would use it for:
- support (basically linking users to existing documents or helping potential contributors to find their way into the project)
- research (engaging with the community to gather opinions, perspectives and knowledge)
Both of those points require to some extend to be responsive with the Tails account.
(for deeper discussions one can switch to reply with personal account. Thought responding also from the Tails account increases engagement, because other notice it being responsive. So I would really encourage to keep doing that. Goal is, to build some sort of community around that account)

If there is fear, that Tails could loose trust, by miscommunication that could happen but should not, this could maybe be mitigated through communicating that this account is (also) managed by non-developer who might write here, but don't touch the code base/infrastructure.
If we want so, we could also decide to mark posts with /[team-alias].
(while I wrote this, I didn't read until the end. My conclusion in the end is adopted to the requirements you mentioned)
>Why "a few"? When speaking with an official Tails account, one
>engages Tails' reputation and the safety of our users.


yes!

> Rarely, we retweet something. We had a few mishaps in the past

about retweeting, so we're super careful now.

yes. I tend to only repost if I or people/organization I trust know the person/organization well enough to assume they act in good faith for Tails and its user, and also don't have a (hidden) personal agenda that is about spreading conspiracy theories, bigotry...
>> the friendica account acts mostly as a twitter mirror.


>I think a mirror from our Twitter would be a great start! This would

give Tails a voice in the Fediverse, without committing to a higher
communication bandwidth than we can afford.

Yes. Before making this account an official account, I (or someone) should try to resolve how the tweets are imported. Currently half of the post is written into the header, and then the same tweet into the body. It works, but doesn't look good. (if the wish is to make it official I'll try to find out how to solve it, otherwise I'd leave it as it is)
If it is only to "give Tails a voice in the Fediverse, without committing to a higher
communication bandwidth", I'd say this is already solved by the not-yet-official accounts.
If this is the only goal, I'd say an official account is not needed but might increase its outreach by communicating through other channels that it exist.
> If we ever decide to change the status quo wrt. who can speak in the
>name of Tails on social media, then this discussion could be framed
>very differently. For the sake of hopefully reaching & implementing
>a conclusion on a first iteration soonish, I propose we frame the
>discussion within the status quo _for this first iteration_.

Sounds good. An useful accomplished job, is better then a not-accomplished job.

Possibly there could be also two accounts. One that is and behaves as the official account and another one that is marked to be run by supporters/community to archive the goals I mentioned earlier for having such an account. (to some extend is that already how the both accounts are managed. One currently managed and filled with content by me, and another that gets its content automated from twitter) That would not touch the status quo, and still allows an more progressive approach.

What's your opinion about that?
>Is this mirroring process automated?


Yes it is, even so it should be improved. Currently it is set up like this:
use nitter.net to create a rss feed.
import this feed into friendica.

There are other methods to do this. But I found this to be the most simple one that I could just set up without needing to host anything, or without needing to have access to the twitter account.

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this task is also tracked here: https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/17092 (https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/17092)
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