Social Media Links for A People-Centred Community
You! You, university! You, sports club! You, local library, city council, school, church, youth group! Your social media links could look like this:
Join us in our own spaces! — [Mastodon] – [Pixelfed] – [Friendica] – [PeerTube] ...
— [Blog] – [Fediverse] – [Matrix] ...
We are also on commercial media: — [G] [A] [F] [A] [M] ...
with an explanatory footnote or pop-up:
Note: * Our primary social and discussion spaces belong to us. They are under our own control. In these spaces our organisation's values and rules apply: for example on membership eligibility, acceptable topics, age limits, real name requirements, historical archiving, data privacy, spamming, and other matters. * Accounts we hold on commercial services are subject to each respective service's control and terms and conditions, and as such are not under our control and do not necessarily comply with our own values and rules.
I want us to create a campaign of outreach, which we can show to organisations, which clearly and persuasively shows why and how they can have their own social and discussion spaces, and why they should elevate their own above commercial ones in their own outreach materials.
Many organisations currently promote only commercial social media. Typically they show a list of icons of the biggest commercial media. Some operate one or more self-owned social media, but where they show a list of options do not show any distinction between their own and the others. The software that organisations use to create their website often adds another bias by making it easy to show and link to big commercial (and mainly older) social media, and harder to include the icons and links to self-owned (as well as newer commercial) channels.
If I were to begin in grass-roots style, I might simply write to some organisations local to me. However, we could get the message across much more effectively if we work together.
- We should put some effort into refining the wording, the presentation.
- We need an artist's help with mock-ups.
- We should invent a name, a branding, and a web site that we direct people to read about the proposition.
- We should link it to related campaign issues such as privacy, autonomy, owning one's tools, free software, local economy.
- We should investigate personalising the message: “this screen-shot shows your current web site; what do you think of this mock-up?”.
- Of course we must direct the recipient to sources of support, ranging from learning more about the issue to how to obtain self-owned social media.
Then we should find ways of contacting a large number of relevant recipients.
Who could co-ordinate something like this? I am not a campaigns organiser. I would love to find people who can take on a project like this. Could you help?
This is an open letter. Please use, adapt, study, improve, and share it. I hereby license it CC-BY-SA.
Related:
#fediverse #awesomeFOSS #degoogled #campaign #outreach #openEdTech
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