I’m thinking that we could make contrib projects benefit from this account.
Pro:
Make the account more active
More visibility for contrib projects
Cons:
Release note posts of XWiki might be diluted in a stream of unrelated posts.
Implementation
Since sharing the credentials to the account beyond the committers wouldn’t be wise, I considered a few options, listed below.
Option 1: delegate to committers
Contributors can ask committers, through the chat or forum, to post a message on their behalf. The message could mention the original author’s Mastodon account if they wish to be credited.
Option 2: message boost
The contributor post a message on Mastodon by himself, then ask for a committer to boost the message with our Mastodon account.
Option 3: automated message boost
I haven’t investigated this option deeply, but I think it wouldn’t be too difficult to automatically boost posts based on a rule. For instance, boost all posts that are:
with the #xwiki and #contrib tags
with an author who is part of an allow list of trusted contributors accounts
Conclusion
WDYT of the general idea of allowing contrib projects to use our Mastodon account?
If application, which implementation option do you think is best?
Since the options are not exclusive, I’m +1 for options 1 and 2.
I would work on option 3 only if option 1 and 2 becomes to much work for maintainers.
It makes sense to me. We already ask to send an announcement on the xwiki.org blog.
What would be even better IMO, is to automate the publication of the mastodon release info. One idea would be to sync the mastodon publications with the xwiki.org blog posts, i.e. when publishing a blog post for the first time, send a mastodon message and link to the blog post.
If we want to have a nice message on mastodon, we would need to use the ExternalServletURLFactory to render the blog post extract and use that as the mastodon message.
To implement all this we would need a contrib extension that implements an EventListener to listen to a change in the published xproperty of the blog post objects, and then find a java library to send a message to mastodon. Then, decide how to store the credentials (maybe mastodon offers an application key to post to it).
Before this is done, I don’t know, all options sounds ok.
One more thing: whereas having a blog post on xwiki.org is mandatory, I wouldn’t make it mandatory to have it announced on mastodon. That should be optional IMO (until we implement it with an automatic process at least).
I propose to close this discussion with the following conclusion.
It’s ok for contrib extensions to use our FOSSTodon account to communicate about contrib extensions.
We currently don’t have an automated way to do this, but we need to consider a tool to automatically post messages from our RSS feed to Mastodon (e.g., using https://mastofeed.org/).
