alesonmedeiros (Áleson Medeiros)
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May 16 2019, 3:16 PM (254 w, 20 h)
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May 29 2019

alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

Why not test at least?

Let me be clear also: I am not against this idea, but I am not for this idea either, at least until I don't see a good reason to go ahead with it. So far I have not seen that good reason.

For what its worth, there are a lot of things we do for which we haven't discovered good reasons. For example, posting to Diaspora* does not seem to be doing much for us. Somebody (with excellent intentions) made an account back in the day, put the KDE name and logo on it, and then moved on and stopped posting to it. The account lay empty for years. Now we maintain it so it doesn't look like we are slackers that don't care about projects we start. The problem is that, if we close it now, it will be a slap in the face to those few users that do follow us on it. Ultimately it is just one more thing we have to do, but it would have probably been better if nobody had started it in the first place.

While we are on that topic, and before you say "But I'll maintain it!", note that it is more common that someone walk away from an account set up in KDE's name (often without sharing the credentials), than them staying around to maintain it forever. We have spent days on end trying to recover abandoned accounts. Most of these accounts now make us look sloppy and disorganised as they are empty and contain obsolete information, because we have only been able to get access to a few.

Note that my objections are not very different from those of any other FLOSS project. If you go to the Linux kernel community and offer to add something to their code, the must polite answer you will get is a firm "no". Try submitting a patch to Plasma see how far you get. First you have to prove your solution actually solves something and you can somehow convince everybody you will maintain it. Even then, the scrutiny on your work will be intense and the hurdles many. There are good reasons for this, first and formemost nobody wants to have to maintain bad or useless code.

You want the Instagram thing to happen? Fine. Do the homework. Prove -- with data-- it will help us. Stop posting to this thread. Go and find out the things we need to know and everybody will back the idea.

Even me.

May 29 2019, 3:47 PM · KDE Promo

May 27 2019

alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

Ok! 👍

May 27 2019, 9:36 PM · KDE Promo
alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

Regarding the use or not of Instagram: Data that we can consider There are 1 billion active users, according to Instagram itself.

I have fallen for this in the past, but the argument that just because there are a lot of people somewhere, doesn't mean you will get a lot of people interested in what you are pushing. There are 7.7 billion people in the world, but a literally insignificant proportion of them use FLOSS desktops, and we have been pushing those for coming for thirty years now.

We have a potential to reach more than a specific niche of users. We can have contact with people (who can become potential users) from various places or countries, ages.

Notice that I didn't ask what could happen. This we already know. We need to know HOW we can make it happen.

The interaction must be different from other networks we have examples of companies (something that we can use to inspire and adptar to the users we want to reach, who are usually technical people or not) we have: @netflix, @nubank, @lego,

I don't think any of these organisations are similar to KDE in any significant way.

@redhatjobs,

One has to wonder about this one. Is Instagram a good place to post job openings? Anyway, still not very relevant to us.

redhatinc

This one may be interesting. More information please!

who interact with their followers with post, videos stories.

Well, yeah... That is what Instagram is for.

As a great free community project I dare say that KDE would be a pioneer in entering and interacting in this way with its public
(GNOME does not yet have an official account in Instagram)

There may be a good reason for this (or maybe not). Have you researched why they don't have an Instagram account? You can ask them. The people who do promo at GNOME are very nice indeed. Maybe we could introduce him to some of the people we talked to the other day, @skadinna?

The initial idea was to have some sort of schedule for posting. After taking the time to think about it, I do not believe scheduled posts are the correct way to handle Instagram engagement. Instead, the accounts content could be based on the following:
Events (Pictures from events, marketing materials ahead of events)
Possible developer spotlights
Screenshots & video of upcoming releases (e.g. KDE 5.16 preview)
User-created content
Custom wallpapers, themes, extension spotlights
Perhaps a hashtag like #MyKDE or #KDECommunity to show off different tweaks.

Yes, we do all these things with our other social media accounts. I would really like you to think about more on how Instagram is going to help us achieve some of our long term goals and less on what you think we should post.

Within these categories perhaps different days of the week (or month) could be used in order to establish routine interaction with Instagram users. Regular interaction is important because:
It can foster an engaged community on the platform

But this is not a goal in on of itself. You want to translate that into a larger userbase, or more contributors, etc. That is what you have to be thinking of.

Promotes familiarity with KDE users and potential contributors on the platform

Branding and increasing contributors, yes! This I can get behind. However, I still don't see how you get from "posting stuff to Instagram" to "increasing number of users/contributors". It would be helpful to find an example of some organisation that have managed to do that. That would be golden. More research needed!

Maybe see if you can find and article with a title like "How we turned our Instagram followers into paying clients/contributors to our project/ambassadors of our organisation", or something like that.

Creates more opportunities for people to share KDE

Do you mean KDE users who are already on Instagram sharing our stuff?

May 27 2019, 6:16 PM · KDE Promo
alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

I would rather be spending energy discussing how to embrace this idea and give it a shot rather than how to restrict it.

OK, then let's do that. We should turn the idea into an actual plan, then make an account and decide who's going to manage it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't make sense to just make an account on a whim and leave it empty or fill it with half-baked content while we fumble around trying to come up with a strategy. That's not how you launch a new social media presence...

May 27 2019, 3:55 PM · KDE Promo
alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

We want to figure out what we want to achieve with an Instagram account. What we are looking for is to answer the question of how (or if) it helps progress towards achieving any of Promo's long term goals. It may be that Instagram is a very useful tool for that or not useful at all. At this stage we don't know.

Once we have figured that out, and if the outcome is in favour of starting an Instagram feed, we have to figure out a strategy. We need to work out who we want to reach, what we are going to show them and to what ends, that is, what we want followers to do given the information we show them.

We can probably work a lot of this out by looking at what other similar projects do and whether they are successful.

Like that, the effort of maintaining another social media account, one which is also a bit different from what we currently have and that will require slightly different kind of posts than, say, Twitter, Mastodon, Facebook and Diaspora*, will be compensated by the success in... I don't know... encouraging more people to use Plasma and/or KDE applications or helping people join the community, or whatever.

It will also help us develop a solid criteria for discriminating between what is a useful platform for Promo's goals and what isn't. This is a valuable exercise.

May 27 2019, 3:50 PM · KDE Promo

May 24 2019

alesonmedeiros added a comment to T10979: Add Instagram to KDE's social media.

Idea:
KDE as a great project to enter Instagram and have a greater interaction with users (people of different ages and places)

May 24 2019, 6:36 PM · KDE Promo