Contributable Social Media Account

Idea: Let's make the postmarketOS social media account contributable!

Summary

Most people get to know our project either through searching, or social media. So what if, to help increase our reach, and also help onboard contributors who have little programming experience, we put them to work with the social media accounts!

Details

Here's the idea: there would be a repository, where anyone can create a MR. Upon approval of a TC (or whoever currently has account credentials), the MR could be merged, and a GitLab runner would automatically then post the post, using the Mastodon API.

But who?

The idea to gain reach could work out as follows: let's say you're scrolling on the fediverse or whatever, and you come across a post saying something along the lines of "ahhh, my phone has reached EOL". Well then, you could create an MR, and respond with the pmOS account saying "hey... we gotchu". Or if let's say you made a really cool contribution in some pmOS project, and want to show off your awesome work! Well, create an MR, and get your post (or maybe a new post) boosted from the official pmOS account.

Let's make this easier!

I imagine for the few people currently with account credentials, going through MRs still seems a bit tedious, and the TCs already have so many MRs to look through and approve. Social media prefers fast response times in things like replies. So maybe could have a system, where, let's suppose you run across the "ahhh, my phone has reached EOL" post. Instead of bothering to open up gitlab, forking, then git pull, then making the content, then pushing, then creating the MR, and then waiting for it to be merged, how about let's remove that out of the equation. The idea would be you see the post, then write a direct private message to the pmOS account, saying, [link to post][reply] : "hey... we gotchu". Then the MR would automatically be generated, waiting for approval.

I realize also that with the Let's make this easier! idea section, could also just do that, thus messaging the account holders and bypassing all the gitlab shenanigans. I dunno though, I think it being tracked in git would help re-enforce the FOSS nature of an account, and encourage that behavior of contributing more (and help with onboarding people to contributing on the postmarketOS gitlab!). And it would be cool either way (I of course volunteer to do all the work of setting up the repo, scripts, and gitlab runners, etc...).

Hi Rammy! Thanks a lot for proposing this idea. Having a goal to making social media more contributable certainly seems cool. However, the proposed solution seems like it would involve a lot of work, and we would rather take a more simple approach (like not involving git or bots).

Our current way of making the social media contributable is basically through the #postmarketOS hashtag, and then having the @postmarketOS account boost the post. We have certainly not publicized this a lot, maybe you can help us figure out how to do that? Currently, we have some guidelines on how to use social media for those with access to the Mastodon account. They are not public, but they probably should. So the plan is to publish them as part of postmarketos.org!335 (merged)

Current guidelines

General:

• Use the pmOS mastodon acc to boost stuff, and announce things like new releases, service packs, podcasts.
• For replying to posts, use personal accounts instead of the pmOS account.
• About 20 boosts per week max, so we don't fill up other people's timelines too much. We don't need to post all the time, only posting once a week is fine too (but doing it more often is fine if there's good posts)
• When something doesn't fit, let's discuss it first before deleting (except if it is completely out of line, then delete it first but discuss afterwards)
• The account should get nice feelings across, not make people feel angry.

What NOT to boost:

• Posts that are negative about other projects (i.e. I switched from distro/UI X to postmarketOS with UI Y and it's much better)
• Posts that make demands to projects / people, i.e. Mozilla should make their browser more adaptive for phones. This will just annoy them and cause outrage, not get the thing done (what does get it done is instead collaborating with upstream in their trackers, sending patches, etc.)
• Posts warning about people trolling postmarketOS (e.g. defacing of our wiki pages, ongoing trolls impersonating others on pine64 irc). Talking about them publicly on our mastodon just encourages them more, they laugh about it and keep going. The "fix" is rather not giving them any attention and e.g. quietly fix defaced wiki pages, or talking to IRC admins behind the scenes about the spam attacks. Or banning people if they do it in our channels (via the bot, so they can't even react on who did it), rather than talking about whatever they posted.

What to boost:

• People enjoy using postmarketOS
• People working on software / hardware stuff related to postmarketOS
• Releases of upstream projects we use (new KDE, Sxmo, GNOME, Phosh, Biktor's modem FW, Alpine, ... versions) (when we see them, we don't need to specifically look for them and boost all of them, that's too much effort)
• Linmob's weekly blog posts (gives a great summary of the whole Linux mobile scene, including a lot of the upstream projects we use, and oftentimes mentions postmarketOS but is worth posting even if it doesn't to emphasize that we are part of this greater linux mobile community) - ollie tries to boost them every week
• Other things that are related in a wider sense, e.g. FSFE upcycling campaigns may make sense

Yeah sorry, this would involve way too much work that we would rather spend on making postmarketOS better. However, inspired by this we have cleaned up the guidelines and made them publicly available here:

https://postmarketos.org/social-media-team/

closed