On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 11:13 AM Dan FitzGerald via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Look, I know that this probably going nowhere, but there is currently an interest in people posting to something other than Twitter because of Elon Musk. I've been on Mastodon for a couple of years, and it has its flaws, but a VCFED Mastodon instance wouldn't be the worst idea on the planet. One of the flaws with Mastodon is that its like Twitter if it was open-protocol and made up of clusters of special interest groups. If we had a VCFED Mastodon open only to members of VCFED (we could make membership to this mailing list a prereq to joining the instance), then the instance's local timeline would be full of posts from this community. As opposed to the tech.lgbt instance I am on, where the local timeline are just a bunch of people that happen to be queer like me... I feel like a timeline full of folks I just spent three days sharing an exhibit hall with would be more of an actual community.
I have never heard of Mastodon. I would be in favor of VCF creating an instance there if there would be people who would use it and VCF could get moderators to support it. As it is now VCF has Twitter, Instagram and Facebook moderated by Adam Michlin. The VCF Forum moderated by Alex Jacocks, Jarrod Coombes, and others. This Mid-Atlantic list moderated by me. The Discord server moderated by me. Places not well supported or not setup: IRC, Mastodon, Reddit, MeetUp, Craigslist, etc. I would love to have VCF on every platform, but it is difficult without adequate volunteers to do this. I realize that everyone has a particular way that they prefer to communicate and be informed. Some like Discord, some like this e-mail list, some like Twitter, some like Facebook. I think that it is great that everyone has a place that they prefer and like to use. From a management point of view, it is more work to post the same message to 10 different platforms. The main issue as I see it is supporting the different areas, moderating them and growing them. This takes dedicated volunteers. We don't always have that, so we support what we can with the volunteers that we do have. Jeff Brace
Regards, Dan FitzGerald They/Them/Theirs http://www.vm.ibm.com/devpages/dfitzger