I wonder if it’s time to delete the Twitter account of WeAreFairphone…
It still has about twice as many followers compared to the Mastodon account. But interaction is almost non-existent, the number of impressions per month is around 600 (single popular posts in the past had reached more than 10k for comparison) and it recently loses 50-100 followers per month (I guess as people leave Twitter, not because of the account, but that’s just a guess).
Fairphone Community Aachen recently decided to donate a few Euros to our Mastodon instance nrw.social (we have some modest local community funds mainly resulting from hardware donations from a local community member). I’m regarding this as our annual contribution for 2022, so I calculated it on a fixed monthly “rate”.
Fairphone Community Aachen’s (8 months old) Mastodon account now has more followers than our Twitter (57 months) and Instagram (12 months) accounts, but I will keep all three accounts for the time being – last but not least because it is quite apparent that each reaches a different audience, and as I think we cannot afford to no longer be able to profit from the official Fairphone account’s scope on the commercial networks (by way of being retweeted by Fairphone).
End of this month the crossposter bot for the company account will close down.
So I no longer need to tell people they won’t get any response when they comment a toot
My impression is that it’s time to move the community account to another instance as social.weho.st seems to be somewhat unmaintained and lately the number of posts that never show up in the timeline of the community account - even when directly searching for them with their full URL - has increased significantly. And as the old company account has been defunct for months, there’s no reason to stay at the same instance, either (the reason why I picked it initially).
Does anyone have a good suggestion for a mastodon instance to move to? Ideally it should be about some of the core topics of Fairphone (sustainability, fairtrade, working conditions), get updated reasonably (weho.st is still on a version that doesn’t allow editing posts) and have good moderation so it isn’t blocked or silenced by other instances.
If you are willing to pay a subscription fee (which is partially used to plant trees), then mastodon.green (or eu.mastodon.green) seems like the best option.
Waag also has ties to Fairphone, as you can see below. Their instance is semi closed, you have to ask for an invite. And the main language seems to be Dutch now. But I don’t think they mind English content at all. They have an international team and their events are often in English as well.
I understood you correctly. For me “joining the fediverse” meant “setting up an account on the fediverse”, just like joinmastodon.org is mainly about creating a profile not necessarily setting up an instance.
Got it, and now I realize that others were replying to your previous message rather than mine
I’m gonna go and have my coffee and see if my brain works better then…
I might be running the risk of creating some disappointment here …
My point of view: After the slowly increasing problems with our current instance, my primary interest is that our new instance reasonably justifies the expectation of stability and – plain and simple – existing in the long-term. In my eyes, a certain size of instance is more likely to ensure this than instances run just by a single person. I would not rule out mastodon.social in this regard even when it’s not explicitly linked to any of the two main causes of Fairphone which in my eyes are fairtrade and sustainability. I had a look at the Mastodon accounts of Fairphone’s Fairtec partners last night and mastodon.social is used by two out of three of these. I also think it would be preferrable if the instance would be English language from the start.
Now on the wish that the new instance is somewhat like-minded, I would like to support that we not forget about the original primary cause of Fairphone, fairtrade. I am most and foremost an ecologist myself and only really got into touch with fairtrade myself a considerable time after I got into the Fairphone project. Ideally a new instance would unite both the “blue” and the “green” aspect, but from my point of view I would not mind an instance that is simply not clearly on one of these two sides.
One more point: Money. While I can definitely say that certainly both Ingo and I myself could easily afford to pay a little money out of each our own pockets to an instance, I think this should be avoided. It’s setting a bad example, just like it is a terrible thing to elect people who promise to donate their elected official pay. It seems noble and generous at first sight, but it leads to aristocracy. Don’t get me wrong: I do think it’s a reasonable thing to support your instance (and I have already paid a modest amount for that purpose in the case of my local Fairphone community – but out of local community funds), but it’s best if this comes from some sort of community funds.