Mastodon Server - typo3.social?

TYPO3 Association
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Hi.

What do you think about having an, e.g. typo3.social Mastodon server?
I don’t want to split the community, but I still think twitter alternatives could be considered.

What are your thoughts on this?
Who should be responsible for this server? I don’t want to force anything on anyone.

Happy to hear your thoughts.

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I think it would be good to have an own instance for the TYPO3 universe. Nevertheless there are some things to consider:

  • who has the capabilites (time/money) to run the server? In my opinion it should be either the TYPO3 server team or the TYPO3 GmbH. But that requires manpower and/or money.
  • Will the TYPO3 GmbH and other teams who have dedicated Twitter accounts (e.g. server team, education team, documentation team) feed Twitter and Mastodon in parallel? Because without content, Mastodon doesn’t make much sense.
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The server team could run such a instance without (or only slightly) increased budget requirements.

I would be willing to move over @TYPO3server, and look into means to push messages from Mastodon to the former Twitter accounts. Don’t know about the other teams and the official channels though.

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I would appreciate if at least an official TYPO3 account would exist within the Fediverse. Many open source projects have an account at fosstodon.org - Fosstodon.

I’ve no strong opinion regarding an own instance. But it would allow us to have “verified” and “official” accounts for TYPO3 Teams. I’m not sure if there is a wish for that. I’ve the feeling communication has become more streamlined and there should be as few accounts as possible, maintained by a dedicated small team.

But I would like the idea to bring back the team accounts. That would open a way to provide feedback where it belongs, e.g. post something mentioning the docs team and it can take care.

I won’t join the instance, as I’ve setup my own single user instance.

We could also think about https://joinpeertube.org/ and other software solutions as well, which are all part of the fediverse. We are an open source CMS mostly used for Websites. I think we should contribute to a proper WWW by providing information without the need of big players like Google or Microsoft.
We already have our own GitLab, we have own Websites and we probably should host our Communication (Chats, Videos, Social Media) the same way. On our infrastructure and open for everyone.

I guess @luisasofie already started to think about joining the Fediverse with an official account from marketing team perspective. And that’s what I would request as a minimum, at least one official active account. But I’m open to see more and would like to move discussions from closed source company owned Twitter to an open source community driven WWW.

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A little bit related (maybe?) is this software: #JoinMobilizon - Let’s take back control of our events which could remove the need for events managed by typo3.org and as an alternative to meetup.com and others for user groups.
It also implements ActivityPub (The protocol powering most software within the fediverse).
That way people on mastodon and other software can interact with that instance.

It is important to notice that there is basically no need to use Mastodon. There are many different solutions out there all with different feature sets. Most are compatible to each other thanks to ActivityPub. So we should think about whether we wanna self host and what kind of software we wanna use. Based on things like:

  • Tech stack for hoster (Server Team, TYPO3 GmbH). I guess not that important thanks to Docker nowadays.
  • Features for TYPO3 ecosystem and users

I’d recommend to check Fediverse - Wikipedia for a short introduction into the general topic.

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Drupal recently started it’s own Mastodon instance:

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I’m in favor of a official TYPO3 Mastodon instance.

For the people that mainly consume and post content around TYPO3, this could be a good starting point in the Fediverse, instead of having to pick a random or closely matching instance (a lot of the new users join places like phpc.social, which is a close call still due to the connection with PHP).

Aside of the obvious point of cost, considering Mastodon is not exactly resourceful, another point has to be looked at: moderation.

In case of Twitter, Twitter itself does the moderation and a lot of the stuff is filtered/not shown. The Fediverse is open to everyone, also to bad actors locally (on typo3.social) or the entire network. This makes moderation a mandatory part of servicing a Mastodon instance.

There are crossposters available, like https://moa.party/ which post things back to Twitter (or Mastodon), so these could be used.

I’m not sure about the technicalities, but as far as I know, Mastodon has support for SSO, so we could wire up account creation to requiring a my.typo3.org account. (an example of this is https://social.vivaldi.net/ where the sign in/up buttons lead to the Vivaldi account page)

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Quick update from the last team leader meeting:

  • TYPO3 Mastodon server & rules are in place now About - TYPO3
  • New accounts can only be created with an invite link
  • For the moment, no personal accounts are allowed, only team and other official accounts
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