Re: [lp-ca-on] Microblogs for Software Freedom Day

[Blaise Alleyne]

On 04/08/15 02:23 AM, Bob Jonkman wrote:
> [...] To answer those questions we need evidence.  Let's not jump to any
> conclusions until we have such evidence, and let's make some efforts
> to gather that evidence.  So far we only have one @SFDToronto account
> on a proprietary social media. We can create a second one (maybe
> @SoftwareFreedomTO), then give the full proprietary treatment to one,
> and only the restricted treatment (as described in previous messages)
> t to the other. Let's see which one is more successful. Of course, in
> order to determine "successful" we need to figure out what our goal is..
> [...]

I agree that we need some evidence, e.g. in terms of whether a restricted usage
account would just be totally useless or still better than not being on Twitter
at all.

I'm not sure if A/B testing would work here though. If there are two accounts,
and the second is much, much more active than the first, why would anyone follow
the first? If there's only one account with restricted usage, people still might
follow it if they're on Twitter but not using GNU Social or RSS or whatever 
else...

I'd be more open to lifting a couple of the restrictions (namely, around
engagement, occasional replies or retweets or direct posts maybe) than setting
up two accounts.

But I agree that we need some data to work with, to get a better sense of
whether there's "scandal" or whether we're actually reaching anyone. For
example, looking at... how people engage or ignore an account with certain
restrictions, to see who we reach, to see if anyone attends the event *because*
of a Twitter account (e.g. asking "how did you hear about the event?" and see if
anyone says Twitter or GNU Social), and to see if there seems to be any
confusion around the account and the principles of software freedom, etc.

I'm open to using SFD as an experiment with Twitter.