I noticed that almost all updates on Mastodon about this project come from @j0rge! That’s totally cool, but are you considering making official accounts for Universal Blue? I ask because folks who are interested in the project may also be interested in following socials for quicker updates. For some people it may be likely that they’ve heard of the project without hearing about Jorge and therefore wouldn’t think to follow him, let alone look him up for this. It could be something simple that lives only on Mastodon and/or Twitter since right now the project seems to be Linux and tech enthusiast focused. Any who, just an idea I thought to mention as my first post on this beautiful Discourse forum. 
3 Likes
Hi Joseph, welcome!
GitHub - discourse/discourse-activity-pub: Adds ActivityPub support to Discourse. seems to kinda do what we want but it doesn’t appear to be available on the OSS plan.
My opinion is that something like that ActivityPub plugin can do that job, but it doesn’t encourage the extra touch that comes with writing a social media post and participating with the community on the platform. For Mastodon especially hashtags are important, so it would add value if that can be accounted for in the posts. But even then just having that account with the Universal Blue brand could make an impact!
If there was someone who was interested in and available to manage an account for you guys, would you be interested? Is there any policy or process that would be to be followed?
If someone is volunteering my choice has to be yes lol.
Here’s the governance steps, where I think the “needs of the project” would make this nice and easy. 
2 Likes
I would volunteer if I had the time, but let me see if this other person I’m thinking of is available to help… 
Unfortunately the person I was thinking of also doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage an account. But I’m happy to help anyone who has questions and maybe I’ll be more open in the future.
1 Like
Ok, I am too interested in this project to not want to contribute somehow.
I am willing to help start a Mastodon account and manage it with occasional posts if @j0rge and maybe someone else also has access. Ideally I would like to be able to establish the account with at least 1,000 followers and then be able to leave it in your guys’ hands for updates if I can’t continue supporting the channel. From what I’ve seen, a lot of the kind of thing that Jorge posts about uBlue would easily work on an official account, so a “transition” wouldn’t be so stark.
From a content strategy perspective, I think that we could probably stick to at least one post a week between posts on this forum, documentation, news, and Jorge’s videos. Hopefully as we have a point for users to rally around on Mastodon we can start encouraging them to post about uBlue more via engagement. Then the Mastodon account becomes another channel for marketing the images, the idea of cloud native, and any needs we have for contribution.
My main thing is just setting the expectation that I may not be able to manage this indefinitely. If that’s ok with you, then I’m willing to give this a shot.
I’m hitting the road for the next week so I don’t have time to cycle around to this but that sounds like a good idea?
Let me know if we have a preference for a specific Mastodon server. Honestly I think setting up shop in mastodon .social or mastodon .online would be fine. Hachyderm is an option, but I know they have a lot of rules there over specialized accounts, which ours would be. Besides being on a server that stays update to date on the latest Mastodon release, I’m open to exploring options.
Once I know which Mastodon server to use, I can go through the setup and pass you credentials at a good time.
Fosstodon seems like it would be a good fit, in general. Lots of FOSS projects call it home.
1 Like
Just following up in case I can get started on this over the Christmas break. Is there a formal approval I should wait on before starting? Any specific direction?
Go for it! fosstodon seems fine to me?
1 Like
First instance I thought of too.
It lives!
Still a work in progress as I fine tune what marketing copy to use in the description and what not. Will take some time as I post to find a reasonable frequency for us to be posting and what are the best hashtags to use.
A big part of the strategy will be following contributors from this project who are having an impact. We probably won’t follow every one, but following key contributors will be great for easily boosting the posts you make on your personal accounts when relevant. I’ve started by following Jorge and @kylegospo, but let me know if there are others who would be good for this.
1 Like
Not urgent, but if we can add this link to the main website at some point to have the Mastodon account be verified, that would be neat. Jorge already posted about the account so I think we’re fine for starting.
<a rel="me" href="https://fosstodon.org/@UniversalBlue">Mastodon</a>
Alright just PRed the fix, we should be generating that soon once the build finishes in the next few minutes.
Boom, it’s done. Thanks!