Apart from advocating for improving mastodon and making advertising on a political level (as described before) in the last 2 weeks 3 scientists from different fields approached
private about
- questions about intransparent content moderation in mastodon
- hosting instances for people unhappy with content moderation (from AWS grant …)
and public - survey about content moderation in mastodon
Because reactions to the mentioned article range currently from
“to less sources named” until the opposite about not “mentioning individuals by name”,
I will sum up only my ideas here what we as users can do to improve overall engagement
Let us think about encouraging formats
discovery
The /about pages could have two video links
- What is the Fediverse? [5min. video t.b.d.]
- What is mastodon?
and - encourage to first toot #introduction [or the equivalent localised intro-hashtag]
content
Voices
mp3 posting is nice on mastodon (or peertube).
In germany we have a nice format as a refesher or meta communications and it is
#DieStimmenImFediversum invented by KaptainRio / DE intro
Proposal: Do it and introduce also #TheVoicesOfFediverse and other languages …
Weekly recurring hashtags
Maybe the best way to improve engagement because people keen on the topic will be active at least 1 day in the week.
Example
A friend of mine does https://twitter.com/quiztime -> #fridayquiz and it makes engagement (and also encourages/teaches fact-checking)
networking
following is not directly solvable, just brainstorming
Reminders
I like the weekly summaries of e.g. discourse.
Google+ did it in the form of posts from people you interacted with most and most relevant topics and it engaged to come back to comment.
Chaos
is borrowed from HopIn, the world’s leading (proprietary) “all-in-one virtual event platform”
[not checked if they borrowed it from Open Source] :
Let’s say, you have a networking button which connects you to random people.
I was so surprised at digitaleurope Masters of Digital, it is like a lottery.
It was perfect, you meet people across the whole democratic spectrum, some very clever and if you “win” you have a new fellow. Improves connections (follow by random discovery, not only algorithm suggestions)
How can we do both: Send people to the streets (well theoretical, I know about pandemic) and make them frequently come back with content sharing to mastodon?
Hopefully more ideas soon after https://openforumeurope.org/event/policy-summit-2021/ today. It’s live since 5 minutes.