Close/de-list Jupyter Twitter account

[minrk]

It seems long past due for Jupyter to close its Twitter account, or at least stop posting to it, promoting it, or linking to it. We have replacements at mastodon and blue sky in place, and at this point it feels rather embarrassing to still have an official presence on the platform that does anything other than point to somewhere else. How should we go about this?

[krassowski]

Just for context: Mastodon accont is inactive and decision about instance has not been reached (@fosstodon has not changed its language rules, #146). Bluesky is not an alternative as of now as it is invite-only.

[blink1073]

Yes, as @krassowski there isn't yet a clear broadcast channel to replace our use of Twitter. Other OSS orgs like the PSF and the Apache Software Foundation are still using Twitter at the moment as well. The EC are working on standing up a Media Strategy working group to put more attention into the issue.

[minrk]

Twitter isn't really a valid broadcast channel anyway, anymore, as it's completely lost its status as 'where people are', so I think there is little point in using it. I'm not sure keeping it is better than having nothing. We have the blog and forum, both of which are better at this point.

[Carreau]

I'm not sure that is completely true, the announcement from last week still got 3 Replies 11 Retweets and 26 Likes.

I can't vouch for activity on bluesky as this is still private beta AFAICT.

I'm happy to leave twitter in the long run, but I would prefer to have a proper media team before, otherwise we are just going to make our communication worse than it is currently is.

[minrk]

It is so deeply disappointing and frustrating to spend so many months actively supporting a company that officially endorses, enables, and publicizes hatred and violence by continuing to promote the platform as our broadcast channel. Having nothing is better than what we're doing now. I really don't think we lose anything by just closing the account.

[Carreau]

I think the conflict may come from the multiple things your original message ask, and maybe is missing concrete action plan.

If you want to stop listing Twitter on multiple places, I'm all for it, and will be happy to review merge your PRs.

I do not have access to tw credentials in the vault, so can't change the @ProjectJupyter Bio on there, but that would be fine as well.

I likely still have delegation access via tweetdeck, so I can schedule a "We are now at please unfollow us here once you followed is there" and we can look at how many of the current ~90k people we have unfollow us.

And yes I would have love to have a social media team sooner. But I'm actually more embarrassed by still having a Facebook account at that point.

[krassowski]

I think that delisting links from official websites is ok but the other part:

schedule a "We are now at please unfollow us here once you followed is there" and we can look at how many of the current ~90k people we have unfollow us.

Is IMO not something Jupyter should do as such an action can be interpreted as antagonising audience and those who are still on that platform.

For what it's worth, there was a lot of engagements with the tweets on the JupyterLab 4.0 blog post (e.g. https://twitter.com/realpython/status/1667925184806899712 >1000 hearts, >200 retweets; and more here https://twitter.com/pycoders/status/1668258604984545281 and elsewhere) which highlights that it is a pity that instead of a tweet to blog post the Jupyter account retweeted a post from a private account which lead to such a low reach as mentioned previously.

[ellisonbg]

On the broader question of Twitter: I am very unhappy about the state of Twitter and its alternatives, but as of today, I get information from Twitter that I can't get anywhere else, and I am able to reach people that I can't reach any other way.

I also think that @krassowski makes a good point about how the JupyterLab 4.0 Tweet was handled. @JasonWeill drafted a tweet for JupyterLab 4.0 with the intent that it would go out on the official Jupyter account, but was told to Tweet it himself (he has only 500 followers). As one would expect, it didn't go very far.

Also, pinging @Ruv7 and @blink1073 who lead the emerging social media team for the EC.

[JasonWeill]

I'd like for us to adopt two social media habits to improve engagement:

1. Activate a Mastodon account on an instance that matches our values (or by spinning up a NumFOCUS instance, if we can't find one) and simultaneously post all content to both Twitter and Mastodon. This creates a hot standby that we can switch to when Twitter goes down.
2. Periodically review replies and mentions, engaging with them as we see fit. This shifts our strategy from "broadcast media" (one-way communications) to "social media" (two-way).

[minrk]

I think the conflict may come from the multiple things your original message ask, and maybe is missing concrete action plan.

Fair. Right now, all I'd propose is removing links, and stopping posts to the twitter account. I think it's already unmonitored. We could update the bio to just point to the blog or something.

• remove twitter links from jupyter.org
• remove twitter links from medium
• stop posts from the official twitter account (and JupyterCon, etc.)
• if/when EC has a social media plan, don't include twitter in it

What I'd like is to immediately delete the twitter account entirely, as I don't think anything would be lost. Second choice would be to make it private with a link to somewhere else (e.g. blog for now) in the bio.

[Carreau]

For me the big no on deleting is because I believe Medium (and Figma?) are login-via-twitter, and the second reason is if we delete there are risk of Someone picking it up to impersonate.

[Carreau]

For me the big no on deleting is because I believe Medium (and Figma?) are login-via-twitter, and the second reason is if we delete there are risk of Someone picking it up to impersonate.

Just to be clear what "delete" means, I think we should keep the name, but if it it decided to delete all the old content I would not oppose. We do have a history of keeping placeholder names like https://twitter.com/JupyterDev which we do have access to.

[ellisonbg]

Trying to step aside from my own thoughts about social media and Twitter in particular... This is a complex issue that involves a rapidly changing social media landscape and impacts multiple aspects of Jupyter (community, marketing, outreach, announcements, JupyterCon participation, fundraising, etc.). These decisions need to be made by the Executive Council (EC) with input from the community. Please keep the feedback and questions coming on this thread and the EC will begin to work on this and come back with a plan/questions/etc.

One other thing that is may not be evident is that the EC has a large backlog of urgent and major items and "fires" that require significant work, discussion, and decision making. We are making progress and are doing everything we can to scale the work by involving others - please be patient though :-)

[Ruv7]

To provide a brief update and to clarify our current structure for this decision, @blink1073 and I are working on a charter for a Media Strategy working group. Our first meeting was last week and our second meeting is tomorrow Thursday. Once this is ready we'll present it for a vote from the EC + SSC. In the meantime a response to this issue will be taken on the EC which as Brian mentions is a facing a large backlog. Please know it's on our radar and I agree a decision/strategy/next steps for this channel and the others is overdue.