🗳 TSC Proposal Vote: official AsyncAPI Mastodon account & asyncapi.social server

[quetzalliwrites]

Lovely @asyncapi/tsc_members, it's time to vote on maintaining official AsyncAPI Mastodon account and server

Due to recent (and insane) developments within Twitter per the Musk acquisition, Mastodon has just passed over 2 million active monthly users. MANY DevRel folks are already migrating over, some creating PR directories to help people re-find each other from Twiter.

Is Twitter "save enough"?

Many community members have expressed concern about Twitter already feeling less safe, this begs the question of whether AsyncAPI wants to continue keeping a strong Twitter presence, or if creating new community via Mastadon is a safer option.

VOTE: official AsyncAPI Mastodon account and asyncapi.social server

Should we maintain an official AsyncAPI Mastodon account and the current existing asyncapi.social server? Please vote either YES or NO.

This would imply paying approx. $40/m server fee by the AsyncAPI Open Collective funds.

[fmvilas]

For context, this is the account @alequetzalli means: https://asyncapi.social/@asyncapi. Also, this doesn't mean we're gonna quit Twitter. We'll remain there as before but we just enable a new social network given the amount of presence it's gaining, especially from the tech folks.

EDIT: sorry, I didn't see the link to the profile Alejandra added above 😅

[quetzalliwrites]

Yes this is also important to note because DELETING the twitter account would open the door for impersonation accounts. (I know trolls are already doing that, so we def don't need to remove the AsyncAPI Twitter account or anything like that)

[GeraldLoeffler]

Having a Mastodon presence seems increasingly necessary, although I suggest monitoring impact to see if the stampede to Mastodon continues or is just a temporary phenomenon.

OTOH, I don't see why maintaining our own server is necessary. (Although I do agree that the resulting handle is nice). I wouldn't advise taking on the burden of hosting our own server.

[quetzalliwrites]

I also am second-guessing the need to maintain our own server.

I assumed it was because Fran wanted more control over the CoC over that space. Is that why you wanted your own server @fmvilas or is it another reason?

[fmvilas]

No, I did it because I couldn't find a reliable server. Most of them were handling a lot of demand and therefore the experience was brittle. So I decided to offload my account but instead of creating one server just for me I thought it could be cool to have it for AsyncAPI.

[aeworxet]

The proposal relates not to 40 USD/month but to several thousand USD/month, because

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/#choice
websites listed in the picker all agree to adopt the Mastodon Server Covenant, meaning that they

• pledge to actively moderate against hate speech (hired role),
• to take daily backups (hired role),
• to have at least one emergency admin (hired role),
• and to provide at least 3 months advance notice in case of shutdown (3x40 USD if shutdown is voted to take place IMMEDIATELY).

Following the desire not to blow up the budget but also understanding the importance of having the ability to reach out to audience, I would propose TO MAINTAIN the @asyncapi Mastodon account BUT on some other server, laying responsibility for and costs of all the abovementioned areas on the owner of that third-party server.
(it is possible to donate 40 USD/month to the owner of that server but those will indeed be ONLY 40 USD/month, without unpredictable additional spendings)

[DavidBiesack]

I don't think the covenant requires a hired role. Daily backups probably can be (should be) fully automated so I doubt you need a hired role for backups.
But yes, one should be aware that someone needs to monitor/manage/administer the site as part of their job function, and this could be a lot of time each week, depending on the traffic.

This proposal is a bit unclear - who will be allowed to create accounts? Just vetted AsyncAPI people? Apply/Approval/Moderated? Anyone? That will impact how much content moderation will be needed.

The covenant is also only required if you want the site listed :

websites listed in the picker all agree to adopt the Mastodon Server Covenant,
This site may not need to be listed on joinmastodon.org if it is not hosted as a general server anyone can join (but certainly listing is desirable for discoverability).

[damaru-inc]

I'm undecided. I think having a Mastodon presence would be great, but those Covenant obligations aren't something I can say I want to support, unless one of our sponsors gives one of their employees enough time for it.

I don't think their wording implies that taking care of the server has to be someone's full time job.

[quetzalliwrites]

Create accounts? This proposal doesn't mention any new account creation, an AsyncAPI mastodon account already exists.

This proposal has nothing to do with people that may choose to join the current existing AsyncAPI mastodon server that Fran currently pays for out of pocket. (And there will never be a rule about who can join the server, that's not even being considered.)

[derberg]

And there will never be a rule about who can join the server, that's not even being considered

this should be clarified in the description, because if the rule would be to "have it invitation based" then it affects possible costs again. Basically, own-server direction requires more clarification on possible costs that TSC has to take into account.

[fmvilas]

Yeah, I think this proposal is mixing two different things: having an AsyncAPI account and having our own server. I think we should just be voting about the first for now and leave the second out for now. I'm happy to pay for it myself for now and if it becomes a problem I can delegate the hosting to Masto.host or a similar service, where pricing will be predictable. I didn't do it this way in the first place because during the spike, Masto.host was also experiencing problems but after some time I'm sure they should be fine.

[derberg]

• we should continue Twitter presence
• I do not use mastodon, so I'm not able really to say which version is better, our own server or the community server, would be great to have an explanation of own-server advantages
• if we need to own the server, then I'm only interested to understand what is the final monthly cost and why it makes sense to bet on it now and not in 2months when all the emotions cool down
• I'm not worried about moderation/backup costs from "people" perspective, a lot can be automated, and from the CoC moderation point of view, it is not any different than now. If we would have hate speech on Twitter against AsyncAPI community members, related to AsyncAPI, we would have to react as well. We anyway need to discuss CoC next year -> AsyncAPI community building/maintenance goals for 2023 (Proposal) #513

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side note, we can always host the server in our Digital Ocean account, we have free credits from DO. But of course, it would eat up our free credits, and we still should agree of course. DO credits purpose was to support tolling hosting if needed.

[lbroudoux]

Some of my thoughts are below:

• Mastodon presence is now necessary as well as we should continue Twitter presence
• Hype on both networks should be monitored and considered. IMO, UX on Mastodon is not at the Twitter level and makes it hard to use even for people in tech that could be interested in AsyncAPI
• Even if satisfying to embrace decentralized principles I don't see why AsyncAPI needs to have its own instance. I doubt that people outside the core team will create an account on it and stick with mastodon.social, fosstodon.org or some other local instances
• The cost of running it will probably go above the hosting cost (considering backups, updates, ...) and I think we could consider making a donation to some other Mastodon service provider to support the cause 😉

So it's a big YES to AsyncAPI Mastodon account, and a small no to AsyncAPI instance. But as said in Fran's comment we may just stick with vote on account for now and observe real costs and usages of the instance for a few months.

[fmvilas]

A quick update on this. I was the only one using asyncapi.social server and its cost was too high just for me so I got rid of it and moved my account to https://masto.host. This gives me a cheaper and predictable price.

That means AsyncAPI account has been removed too. Not a problem since it only had about 10 followers and it wasn't an official account yet.

So if we ever want to host our own server, I suggest we go with https://masto.host or similar. They have plans for communities too: https://masto.host/pricing/.

That said, given the poor welcome of the previous experiment, I'd just create one account on https://hachyderm.io or another server. I think we should definitely be on the fediverse.