Suggestion: expand Rails social media presence to Bluesky & Mastodon

Hi!

So, Rails has an official account on Twitter that’s actively maintained: x.com. I was looking if there are mirrors of this account on other alternative platforms, but it doesn’t seem like there are any (there is this account on Mastodon, but it’s an unofficial one: Ruby on Rails (@rails@ruby.social) - Ruby.social).

As you’re probably aware, a lot of developers have been moving off Twitter in the last 1-2 years to the competing networks - the ones that count are imho Mastodon/Fediverse, Bluesky and Threads. Just to be clear, I don’t want to get into any fight here :wink: Everyone has their different views on the whole situation. But it’s an objective fact that the developer communities like the Ruby one that have formed on Twitter years ago are now scattered across a few sites and disconnected. I think it makes sense for official accounts like the Rails one to start being active on the new platforms where developers hang out now too.

There’s a number of social media cross-posting tools that support these new platforms - I’ve been told Fedica is good, Buffer has Mastodon support and added Bluesky support last week, others I’ve seen recommended are e.g. Social Champ, CoSchedule, Postpone or SocialOomph. You could also use some command-line scripts.

For Mastodon, you could possibly set up your own instance, though that’s a pretty big time investment. You can also post on one of the existing ones like mastodon.social or ruby.social, or you could contact the person who runs the unofficial account now. Just note that moving between instances is non-trivial if you change your mind later.

For Bluesky, you can use a domain you own as a custom handle, so you could post there as an account named @rubyonrails.org, that will make it look official since it’s clear that it’s the owner of that domain. (It’s verified by either a DNS TXT entry or a .well-known file.)

Let me know if I can help with anything :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Hi @mackuba thanks for the suggestion. I’m pulling a lot of my reply here from a similar suggestion made via a GitHub issue last year.

For those already in the Ruby and Rails communities, there are already so many ways to get Rails news and updates:

If someone dislikes Twitter and has left it, there are plenty of other options. If the options above don’t work, the best of Rails news ends up in a multitude of newsletters and podcasts that you can enjoy as well (and further support the community by subscribing and listening and reading).

And in fact, the Rails feed is automatically posted to the Mastodon account you mentioned above, so if anyone is on Mastodon, that channel also gets Rails news.

In this day and age, it feels like there is a lot of bouncing around to new social media platforms. Who is to say which will continue in the long run, so the best strategy, IMHO, is to stick to a few platforms, and commit to them as well as you can.

That’s not to say that we won’t one day expand to new channels, but for now, we’re keeping it to the compact (but more than sufficient) list of ways to get Rails news above.

Amanda

Rails Foundation

I just posted this in the linked Github issue, but I’ll post it here for visiblity too.

I’m the instance admin of ruby.social, and if/when Rails would like it, the @rails username is available – when the unofficial RSS-posting bot was created, the creator and I had a very clear understanding that the handle would be made available for official use if/when required. Just let me know!