# OKD Community Development Introduction to Mastodon

This document provides a brief overview of the [Mastodon](https://joinmastodon.org/) social network for the OKD community to assist in our understanding of the technology as it pertains to broadcasting OKD news and updates.

## What is Mastodon?

> Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter, which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes, known as instances, each with its own code of conduct, terms of service, privacy policy, privacy options, and content moderation policies.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network))

## How is Mastodon Different from Twitter?

### Decentralized

Mastodon instances are separate from each other and use the ActivityPub standard to share information, contributing to what is informally known as the “[Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)”.

Each instance may have different rules for content creation and moderation, as well as unique allow/block lists for other Mastodon instances.

Content is "boosted" to gain visibility, there is no inherent algorithm curating content for users.

### Focus on Privacy

Privacy is a core concept to the Mastodon community and as such the technology provides more controls for users around ensuring their content and identity are protected. In practice this means that not only does the technology allow users to control what content they see, and who sees their content, but that the community is also very active about protecting the privacy of its users.

### Searching and Sorting

Mastodon does not perform full text searches on the content that is created, instead focusing on indexing hashags (eg "#kubernetes") and mentioned usernames to populate its search databases.

### Culture

It is worth highlighting that the community culture on Mastodon is different than that of the Twitter community. Twitter, in general, is seen as a platform that can be used by both the public and advertisers, it is much more natural to see content on Twitter that is specifically focused on propagating more _commercial_ messaging. By contrast, on Mastodon this drive is much lower and in some cases is frowned upon (some instance communities to not enjoy advertising specific content), although there is broad community support for "showing off" personal projects. While true "commercial" advertising appears limited to a subset of instances, promotion of open source projects, and more bespoke commercial offerings, appear to exist across the fediverse.

Another aspect of community culture on Mastodon are the general understandings of "liking" and "boosting" content. On Twitter, the act of "liking" content will allow the server-side algorithms to post-process content in a way that makes it useful for reuse (eg when showing trending topics to a user). On Mastodon there is no equivalent when "liking" content, there should be no expectations from users that "liking" something will lead to an increased viewership for that content. Instead, the culture of "boosting" (what might be called "retweeting" on Twitter) is the mainstay for promoting content on Mastodon. This distinction is important to consider when evaluating Mastodon as a platform for sharing news as it means that the message might not have as wide a reach without assistance from the community.

## Recommendations

The OKD community currently operates a Twitter account ([@okd_io](https://twitter.com/okd_io)) and should continue to focus on this for broadcasting news from the community. Although current events have made Twitter a controversial space for some users, it continues to be a place where other projects are sharing information.

For the future, we should consider configuring a Mastodon account which will replicate the content that is created for Twitter. The content replication itself could be handled through automation. This should be considered low priority for the community currently, but may become higher if unexpected events reduce Twitter's popularity for messaging.

### Instance Choice

If the community decides to make a Mastodon account, our next decision will be around which instance to join. There are several viable options listed on the [Join Mastodon Server Instances page](https://joinmastodon.org/servers). We might consider what other communities have done with respect to server choice.

* [Fosstodon](https://fosstodon.org), dedicated to free and open source topics and users. The main account for the Fedora project lives here as well as Arch Linux.
* [Mastodon.Social](https://mastodon.social), dedicated to general socializing. This is a large instance and hosts some news channels related to open source projects.
* [Hachyderm](https://hachyderm.io), dedicated to curating a community of technology professions. Many people from the wider open source, and Kubernetes, community have joined this instance.

## Summary

The OKD community should continue posting to their Twitter account. Within the next 12 months we should create a mirror of the Twitter account on one of the Mastodon instances with automation to replicate messages. We should make no plan to deprecate the Twitter account at the current time.