Sorry, I don’t know a better word than marketing which would be appropriate for a collaborative project.
In 2024 I think we can safely say the Fediverse has grown sufficiently to matter. Especially in open source.
I believe it could be good for communication about Haiku if the powers that be around here setup a dedicated Mastodon instance for posting updates from the main developers. Social media can raise awareness and maybe increase donations.
I know there’s @haiku@mastodon.xyz but having a dedicated instance has some advantages:
add your own custom emojis that others can then copy promoting Haiku . One important thing when you have an OS with such good looking icons !
get accounts for leading devs so they can better promote the OS from a common place
get accounts for more specific areas so you have to overload the main account and still provide regular updates . For example to mirror the content of app release announcements
have bot controlled accounts to post events. For example nightly build ready, one for x86 and one for RISC-V. That sort of things
reduce risk tied to not controlling instance (some instances do close)
Disadvantages
Costs & Maintenance: I’d suggest starting with just masto.host which is all managed. Certainly the 20€ plan should be enough for a while. I use the 9€ version, nothing to complain about and I just don’t worry about updates or maintenance.
Moderation: that’s a lot of work on a public instance but if you only use if for official account and possibly some of the biggest code contributors it won’t.
I know we don’t have a stable native client yet for Mastodon. I am eagerly waiting on Tokodon that @Begasus started porting recently
PS: No I don’t want to have any role in such instance. I just plan to be a follower. Just thought if would be a useful suggestion.
Speaking as someone who used to be an admin of a Fediverse (kbin) instance, the effort that goes into moderation cannot be underestimated. Good moderation requires among other things:
being up-to-date with burgeoning bad actors in the Fediverse
awareness of moderation bypasses and workarounds
good judgement of what mod actions to take and when to do them
auditing blocklists (don’t blindly follow them wholesale)
being in-tune with controversies in the Fediverse
That last bullet point in particular can be extremely tiring and disheartening, since not doing so could easily land your instance into a bunch of blocklists that many other instances will follow without question.
I don’t think this is a good idea.
I used to be very active on Mastodon years ago,but completely stopped in 2020 or 2021.
I’m still running 4 instances,because I didn’t want to let the users down,but personally I don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore.
The community is extremely toxic and loves starting hate mobs against people or instances they dislike.
You can even get your instance put on blocklists for not blocking someone else they dislike and feel everyone should block.
After having seen so much there,I think social media is a waste of time.
If it’s about the reach,just use an existing instance for the project account (well,Haiku already does that…) but don’t put in the time and waste a lot of money on a own server in that toxic part of the internet.
Oh, also another thing to keep in mind with running your own Fediverse instance (especially if you’re a legal entity like Haiku, Inc.) is that you have to make sure that you’re not federating with instances hosting illegal content. For example, being federated with CSAM instances and storing media from them (as part of federation) on your server could cause major legal problems if not addressed rapidly.
I know moderating in-fighting can be tiresome. Which is why I suggested only an instance for the Haiku organization. One single source to publish all information under a well defined “brand”. Not one to welcome random users. Nobody wants to manage political or personal fights unrelated to the project.
The whole difficulty with mastodon instances is other people. I for one run my own and approve followers manually but I wouldn’t want to be moderating even my own family. We’ll especially not my family
I am always sad to see some people have had such bad experiences because mine was all the opposite. I definitely would not dismiss the entire platform itself as toxic.
Hm, I am not sure what gets federated and how to be honest. But wouldn’t that only happen if one of the users on your instance followed / reposted a bad actor ? If the number of accounts was limited to just official accounts posting announcements / app updates etc that would both be an issue right ?
Maybe it’d be safer indeed to not even allow even leading haiku devs and just keep this for some automated posts accounts. At this level I don’t see what the risk/cost would be (aside form hosting and maintenance or maybe 20€/month).
If a user just so much as scrolls past illegal content by accident on the global timeline, it is typically cached immediately. That already counts as having it on your server. Also there are instances with spam accounts that randomly post illegal content. While they’re easier to block, it still means purging the media cache and other places where any form of illegal content could be in.
[Preface: I am not a legal expert and this isn’t legal advice.]
And it warrants reiterating that while the legal risk is lesser (but not absent) for individuals, it is greater for legal entities. This means more effort going into moderation and administration for an official instance. The big question is whether the potential legal liability of having a Fediverse instance is worth it to the Inc.
At this moment in time I’d say the target is the vast community of open source devs that have moved over there and aren’t aware of how well Haiku is evolving. When I mention it people get interested. And I actually came back to Haiku because of posts there.
See my post about a potential Haiku case from yesterday (the same thing we discussed on another thread here) Post about Haiku box . You can see it gets reach (16 reposts so far ) and I am no celebrity. Imagine if it had cats
I know social networks are a complex thing, and mental health should be preserved of course but I do believe it’s a wise choice for a project to have a good visibility and that generating regular content in an organized and consistent manner is a way to get that.
It’s a slightly different proposition than a mastodon instance but how about connecting this Discourse forum to the fediverse? That would make it visible on Mastodon and elsewhere and let people participate with any fedi account, the kind of thing you see in this video announcing some of the latest features of the Discourse AP plugin: ActivityPub Plugin - #117 by angus - plugin - Discourse Meta
One thing that most of suggestions leave out is : Who will put in the work to administer, filter, moderate , generating content ?
Instead of developing, this proposes the already few devs would have even more tasks with things unrelated to Haiku, and on not-so-nice places, like social media, to boot.
To be fair the project is already there, just on another instance. So whoever does the current posts on mastodon.xyz could continue on own instance.
Moderation would be the same as actually which means blocking people who send offensive messages to the main account. I agree letting individuals devs have personal accounts was the bad part of the suggestion and this should be scratched.
Other than that the posts on other sub accounts such as new builds can be automated. I have done that here at home or on my servers. You just get a key and call some bash script with curl on the server after each build. A mastodon account’s URL also create a .rss feed that people could subscribe too.
So far me testing Tokodon on Haiku isn’t public ready, the open PR for version 22.04 is old and crashes on second launch, newer version atleast require kirigami up to version 5.94.0 and up which isn’t around on Haiku.
The one I’m using here atm is version 23.08.4 with the 5.114.0 frameworks, I don’t trust myself enough to release this to the public (some issues regarding KIO and Kirigami), but runs pretty stable (as long as I don’t scroll too much, crashes then, but launches fine after that).
Thanks for your work with this @Begasus ! One day it’ll be fixed.
Looks like I’ll have to brush up my C++ skills and write my own client in the mean time . It’s only been 24 years since I last wrote a BeOS app maybe it wouldn’t be that bad if I just write a minimalist thing that can just read posts as an exercise to get back in the game.
I do not want my Mastodon account to be in an official Haiku instance. I retain my freedom to express political views, talk about things not related to Haiku, etc, on my personal account which is not affiliated with Haiku.
That’s just useless spam. You can use RSS feeds for this (there are proxies between RSS and Mastodon if you want to involve a lot of federated servers instead of just your computer and the Haiku website). Or you can just set up an alarm on your wristwatch, since this happens every night at the same hour.
Just pick the instance a litlle carefully, not just because it has a funny domain name.
We don’t host the IRC channels or the mailing list ourselves. They have been working for two decades this way, we just had to move the IRC channels once in 20 years. This is not a big risk, and not worth 240€ per year (1% of our budget). Especially if, in the end, it is hosted by a 3rd party service like lasto.host, which can still decide to close at any time, so you have not solved that problem.
Now, what are the real advantages of a dedicated mastodon instance? Maybe the “local” timeline, where you could see other people with similar interests. But if the instance is just open to Haiku official accounts and announcements, even that will not be very interesting.
I think there’s a small advantage in “branding” to having your own domain. It sort of looks more real. After all one could create haiku@mastodon.social and people wouldn’t know for sure if it’s a fan account or the official one (unless they checked on the site).
I understand that at the current level of funding even 240€ / year is money and it may not be worth it just for that. It’s sane to wait until the project grows to a level where it’d have a dedicated community manager.
The ideal really for full control would be self hosting but that’s a considerable cost in work / problems which is why I suggested a simpler fixed/cost paid service — if the provider gets hits by a truck you can always host elsewhere with same domain.
I mentioned the nightly builds as an example but really since it’s every day it’s not really useful indeed.
As person I noticed recently that there some things I don’t want to get an alert for but I like seeing in my feed to just keep an eye on things. In this particular case level in water tank the morning are posted by my bots (via home asssistant).
I know I wouldn’t go read daily an RSS feed with new app releases. I’d just forget about it. But if it’s there in my daily feed I know I’ll catch interesting stuff . At the moment I follow @Begasus which basically lists many ports.
Really my main complaint as a user is I don’t see enough #HaikuOS posts
I see the current account does not have the “verified” badge for the website in its profile. This seems like a good idea to make it clear that the account is official. I will see about adding the required tags to the website.
If you feel your feed with messages from bots that just repeat every commit, you will stop reading most of it. I know, because this is what happens to my mailbox where I receive every haikuports change. It takes an human like Begasus to put a little work into selecting what deserves a mention, maybe adding a screenshot, etc.
OK, after some considuration here is a port for Tokodon (64bit) to try out.
Issues still around so you have to keep in mind it’s not fully functional as the latest version (this is version 22.04), crashes when launched a second time, so you need to delete the ~/config/settings/KDE/tokodon directory to be able to login again … use at own risk
