So I just heared about this and was troubled enough to get on IRC and
raise my voice. Bubu asked me to reply to this thread as well, so here
I am. You can look up the original conversation via BotBot, see
I have two main complaints here, a general one and one specificly
targeted at using Twitter. However, I will try to focus on the first
one. Twitter is a highly proprietary walled garden, locked behind TOS
and not unlikely to ban or betray its users. It’s unethical and
contrary to the FLOSS spirit to use (or to be used by) it. Especially
since doing so in fact an endorsement, regardless if you say otherwise
on your status page. If you are there for the people, people will be
there for you. It’s the network effect all over again. Please don’t go
that road.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. And in fact, wiser man
have already talked about that in-depth. I don’t try to duplicate what
was already said. For the general complaint just keep in mind: Twitter
is one of the worst possible solutions.
My general advice is: Try not to litter official F-Droid presences
around the web. This reminds me of comanies from the old days try to
be cool and do all this social media stuff at once, regardless if it
makes sense or not. Please really think about what you are going for
and where a presence is favorable. You don’t need to be everywhere,
but where it matters. Instead of spreading the community to multiple
different/distinct/unconnected places, you should provide a focus
point where to gather. Maintaining multiple presences is a workload
that needs people willing to do it: Maybe instead of expanding, try
to manage the requests that reach team@ email first? Anyway, even if
there are enough people that manage all presences, you still have a
lot of duplicated work – answering the same question on multiple
channels is just wasting resources. Even worse when things get not
“duplicated”: Information that might be relevant, will only be
discussed at one of those hubs. See, it is indeed debatable if forum,
mail and IRC are the right tools/places, but expanding this list is
in my experience a problem. (Just for the record: I think they worked
quite well for now).
So, the question that should be answered first is simple: What does
F-Droid want to do? What is the usecase?
From the discussion on IRC it wasn’t really clear what the point
was, but maybe it is just me being a social media newbie. However,
I think there are two target audiences: (A) People that know about
F-Droid like users and app devs. (B) People that dont know about
F-Droid.
Regardless of what their intentions are – offer help, ask questions,
join the community – A-type people will indeed find our website.
From there it is our job to guide them to the right resources and
contact information (and provide the manpower to answer questions).
The only thing about being “there” instead of “here” is to comfort
the lazyness. I experienced it a couple of times back when being
active: People where perfectly aware of F-Droid and where they would
find “help” or information. Instead they just decided to be lazy
and barf on Twitter or Reddit… and in fact, thats what they wanted,
they werent interested in a discussion or solution, they were in for
the drama. And now here is the point: Nobody stops you from going
there. Join the discussion on whatever platform you like, answer
questions, show them around. Devs are free to choose their social
platform, but what would be the benefit of having an official
representation of F-Droid there?
So let us move on to the type B. Again, I am not against people
(users and contributors alike) using their social channels to talk
about F-Droid, show people around and point them to the right
direction. In fact, you cannot stop discussion about F-Droid on
such platforms, it will happen anyway. Feel free to chip in. But
why do we need an official presence there? Is it only the difference
of using a hash versus an at-sign? If you want to talk to “new”
people, convince them, want “growth”, you will need a concept of
what you want to offer. Posting “new releases” and stuff is not
going to win people over that are not aware of F-Droid’s existence.
So again, what do we want to use Twitter and Co for? Can we have
some examples here?
Personal sidenote: I don’t think “growth” is or should be a goal for
F-Droid. F-Droid is a technical project, it’s goal is to build floss
apps from scratch and distribute them. We build the tools for this
and get going. Why and how are questions for the individual
contributor. E.g. I, myself, tried not only to package floss apps,
but try to talk to upstream and provide patches to them, because
I wanted more apps to be available. I signed up for services those
devs used (github, sourceforge, bitbucket…) to do this. I didn’t
use an “F-Droid” account. So if you want growth, if you want to talk
to devs or potential users on a social or development focused
platform, nobody is trying to stop you. In fact, I would even
encourage it: You sign up for unethical stuff to do good. You take a
bullet for the greater good… but please, let F-Droid itself be not
part of this.
for it.