On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 11:32 AM, Strainu <strain...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Personally, I'd love to see WMF or a chapter set up a public Mastodon >> instance; the project has matured significantly since its first >> release and is at least a viable free/open alternative to the >> Twitter-ish forms of social networking. FB still has event management >> functions that are difficult to substitute, however. > Even if there would be an open-source alternative with all the > Facebook functionality, installing, maintaining and promoting it would > be a huge waste of money. I would agree if we compared centralized service to centralized service (e.g. Ello vs. Facebook), but the premise of services like Mastodon is federation between servers (instances) using open protocols like ActivityPub. This means that even small organizations can credibly host "instances" of a social network like Mastodon while participating in the larger federation of users (you can follow users from other instances, reply to their statuses, etc.). Mastodon is the first IMO fairly successful implementation of this approach; it has more than 1M accounts of which about 10% show recent activity, and it already is reaching subcultures beyond the usual suspects. To give you an idea of the cost, you can run a mid-size instance with a few thousand users, automated backups and monitoring for tens of dollars a month (the main cost is in person-time, but most instances like this are run by volunteers and supported by donations). So I do think it would be very possible even for an interested volunteer to set up an instance with reasonable uptime, backup and monitoring characteristics for exploratory use. Certainly it would be possible at reasonable cost for WMF or a chapter to do so, possibly with some "active contributor on Wikimedia projects" requirement for creating an account. Once again, the crucial point here is that instances communicate with each other, so even though your own instance may only have a few thousand users, you are part of the larger "fediverse" which includes software with completely different UIs implementing the same protocol. A nice intro for the unfamiliar: https://blog.rowan.website/2018/01/08/yet-another-explanation-of-mastodon/ Incidentally, the protocol used by Mastodon, ActivityPub, recently became a W3C recommendation: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ Of course, I'm not opposed to people using FB for organizing -- I think it's a totally reasonable choice, for the reasons you say -- but I do think it's worth keeping an eye on federated social networks in general, and Mastodon in particular, as a potential alternative space for Wikimedia to engage in, _including_ for outreach. The numbers are obviously still a drop in the bucket compared with the mega-networks, so pragmatic considerations may reasonably prevail in many circumstances. Erik _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
