Which accounts should we have?

[joyeecheung]

Converting from nodejs/admin#932, some ideas were proposed to have multiple accounts.

We have registered nodejs.org (see nodejs/admin#932) whose credentials are in the Node.js and OpenJS 1Password. DNS verification has been completed.

Quoting @JakobJingleheimer from nodejs/admin#932 (comment)

I mentioned this option on Slack. I could see a @release.nodejs.org for release and feature-related things, a @meet.nodejs.org for conference/meet-up related things we want to publicly advertise, etc. If we do the contrib spotlight, I would do that from a root @nodejs.org account (which could also re-post especially notable posts from sub-accounts, like a major release). I don't see the purpose of a @tsc.nodejs.org account.

Quoting @ovflowd from nodejs/admin#932 (comment)

Im against of us having multiple handles on Bluesky, who's going to maintain them long term? I don't think it makes sense to have them (like one for releasers and one for this and whatnot), we tried on Twitter and never worked.

Quoting @mhdawson from nodejs/admin#932 (comment)

In the past there were some different ideas on what kind of content should be posted to the Node.js social accounts, with one view being that people on the main Node.js social account were not really interested in content related to the working of the project itself including working groups, team meetings, etc. versus information related to using Node.js itself.

If that is still the case then we might want 2 accounts:
1 - main account called node.js
2 - second account called node.js-project-info or something like that where we could put more content on the working of the project itself, and followers could decide if that was something interesting to them.

Adding that to the discussion for consideration.

EDIT: I do see @ovflowd earlier comment about multiple handles, but I think this might be different in having 2 is not the same as having N (N being some larger number)

Quoting myself from nodejs/admin#932 (comment)

I recall we own nodejs.dev (or another .dev? At least nodejs.dev redirects to nodejs.org so I assume it’s this one). Since many projects use the .dev domain on Bluesky and you know, .dev kinda just says its about devs, maybe we can also register nodejs.dev and use it for the automated project updates, community outreach etc. and update the profile of nodejs.org to point developers to nodejs.dev.

One concern I have about it is that many other OSS projects only have just one account to post everything and most projects just post about latest updates and do community outreach all the time in that main account. Having a separate account with a less familiar domain could reduce our outreach. At least as a regular OSS user I would expect nodejs.org post the same kind of content that bun.sh and deno.land and vite.dev and astro.build do, or feel that nodejs.org is a bit too boring to follow if it’s less dev-minded compared to the other ones.

[mhdawson]

My preference is to use a single account for everything we post, however, if there are concerns/objections to posting about activities in the project(team and wg meeting recordings/minutes, upcoming meetings, etc.) in that single account then I think we'd want a second one were we could include those kinds of post.

[joyeecheung]

I am currently a bit torned between "having a noisier .dev account + less noisy .org account" v.s. "having one account to ensure reach and reduce confusion". I wonder if this is something we can also post to Bluesky to discuss, and see what the future subscribers prefer, I like the idea of having this kind of "what kind of Bluesky community are we going to build here" meta discussion on Bluesky.

[joyeecheung]

Posted to Bluesky to see what folks think https://bsky.app/profile/joyeecheung.bsky.social/post/3lbafoclltk2r

[RedYetiDev]

I believe we should use different subdomains for the different purposes. That way, users know that *.nodejs.org is from official Node.js accounts, but we can still allocate different parts to different accounts

[enBonnet]

Single account: ❤️
Two accounts: 🚀

[styfle]

Since many projects use the .dev domain on Bluesky and you know, .dev kinda just says its about devs

I'm only using .dev for my personal account because I'm a developer, so it wouldn't make sense to say I'm an organization. For big OSS projects, use .org such as https://nextjs.org and https://nodejs.org etc.

But more importantly, don't use both .org and .dev because that will defeat the purpose of verification. How can we know the .dev is owned by the same organization since anyone can create nodejs.foo and redirect it to nodejs.org, right?

I think @RedYetiDev & @JakobJingleheimer have the best solution if we really want to have multiple social accounts - use subdomains.

[billywhizz]

i think engaging more often and with a bit less bureaucracy/process is more important than whether there are one or two accounts. there are plenty of official channels already for folks who want matter of fact news about the project.

the whole point of social media, imo, is giving the audience more of an inside and informal look at what is going on behind the scenes and access to opinions and thoughts of regular contributors and core committers. just look at what bun has achieved in a very short space of time largely through their use of social media. some folks might not like that a whole lot, but it's very effective in broadening the audience and building "brand loyalty" (that term gives me the heebie jeebies personally but it's a real thing we need to take seriously).

one way of doing this might be for core people to try to put more out there about the work they are doing, assuming they have the bandwidth to do so, and to use the official account to promote those posts? this is probably a job for someone who is a specialist at devrel/social media and they could ideally just be trusted to do it without oversight as long as they are held accountable if they do anything dumb. 🤔

as @joyeecheung said previously:

At least as a regular OSS user I would expect nodejs.org post the same kind of content that bun.sh and deno.land and vite.dev and astro.build do, or feel that nodejs.org is a bit too boring to follow if it’s less dev-minded compared to the other ones.

i think this is really important, especially when the project is essentially under attack from two well funded commercial entities who have a budget for and are very good at marketing. node.js absolutely is boring compared to bun and deno. but maybe that's just how it wants to be? 🤷

[AugustinMauroy]

I don't have much to say. Except that I don't think you should have more than one account. When you look at the content you've posted on X, you realise that you only post for releases, and even then sometimes it's a repost from a contributor or events.
I propose that we have just one account for the moment with releases, events and news such as new articles on the learn section, explanations of why such and such a change has been made, and why not a spotlight on a great contribution?
So I don't think the question is which blue sky account(s) should we have? But what content do we want to highlight, what do we want to say? And how?

[enBonnet]

The valid reasons I see to have more than one account is if you were going to split the communications in two ways, or if you were going to change the way to communicate things, but if the communication will be the same but split in two accounts it will cause confusion and in some point we will have post reposted from each account.

Also, every account requires moderation and work.

[JakobJingleheimer]

The valid reasons I see to have more than one account is if you were going to split the communications in two ways, or if you were going to change the way to communicate things, but if the communication will be the same but split in two accounts it will cause confusion

The proposal is if there are 2 accounts for them to be different, not redundant/clones 🙂

[joyeecheung]

Summary of the discussions here and on Bluesky so far:

1. The crowd seems equally divided on whether we should have multiple accounts. Some prefer just having 1 to avoid confusion/distraction, some prefer 2, several are fond of the idea of subdomain accounts. Personally I think having more than 2 accounts may be too challenging to maintain, unless most of them have automated content that are just synchronized from another well-maintained source.
2. There were several suggestions of "trying 1 account first, and spin off more if we have the energy/momentum going", which I personally am a fan of
3. Some expressed interest in having low-noise accounts to subscribe to, in particular for release announcements
4. Not from this round but some previous discussions also suggested us to sync it with the existing RSS feeds. We already have https://nodejs.org/en/feed/blog.xml and https://nodejs.github.io/nodejs-news-feeder/feed.xml for example

[richardlau]

2. There were several suggestions of "trying 1 account first, and spin off more if we have the energy/momentum going", which I personally am a fan of

+1 for this suggestion.

[joyeecheung]

From the TSC meeting:

• It seems people are generally in favor of "trying 1 account first, and spin off more if we have the energy/momentum going", so let's just make use of nodejs.org for now
• @mhdawson suggested that we could humanize the communications more by reposting more posts from individuals working on the project, instead of always posting major announcements from the official accounts directly. We can also use the account to reply to posts to invite interactions (something that the AT protocol Node.js SDK supports, too, so we could automate this from GitHub PRs).
• We should have some review guidelines set up for different kind of content. e.g. release announcements should get the fast track once releasers are happy with the content. New collaborators onboarding announcement can be fast-tracked too. Or reposting from certain group of people should be considered safe and can be fast-tracked. Technical content should use more thorough reviews. Will send a PR soon to this repo to discuss and document about these in detail.

[JakobJingleheimer]

Should we add the Bluesky account to the main GitHub page?

[joyeecheung]

Not sure who but someone added it to the profile.

I think this issue can now be closed as we seem to be happy with the "trying 1 account first, and spin off more if we have the energy/momentum going" proposal. Thanks for participating the discussion!