Testing a new channel to phase away from proprietary social media

Workspaces Community Outreach & Coordination
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We now have a telegram channel which we will use as a dissemination channel to replace social media moving forward. Ths in order to meet two needs: 1) give the community members an easily accessible way to stay on top of the best of edgeryders 2) further lessen our dependency on commercial social media services.

You can think of it as a kind of mailing list. We will need to find the curatorial approach: focus (what kind of thing do we post there), language and frequency, good times of the day for different kinds of post.

Benefits

A direct message is much more personal and “cozy” somehow. It’s less noisy than social media which can sometimes feel like yelling out into the void of nothingness. Some specific features to highlight:

  • Easy to sign up - you follow a link.
  • You can have different topic specific channels (so you know who is interested in what- not possible with social media without significant effort or microtargeting in advertising campaigns)
  • Easy to manage from the desktop application
  • No privacy concerns: We are not storing anyone’s data
  • We can set it to “broadcast” only if we want
  • Easy for people who joined to also invite others to join
  • Faster response to CTAs — calls to action

Click-through rates for messages are likely to be much much higher than for bots. Compare that to mailing lists, most of which have to work very very hard to get a five percent CTR, and whose managers throw their arms up in victory at ten percent. Even premiere newspaper publishers would consider a 20 percent CTR a sign that their reporting system might be broken.

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Interesting, I will test it out. So annoyed by standard social medias…

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Nadia – this is perhaps a little tangential, but in regard to “lessen our depenency on commercial social media services,” I’m encouraging people to “grow online greenspace for healthy sociality & mutual aid”

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Am thinking a bit about what in an ideal world we would be doing on telegram without cannibalising conversations on the community platform. Or at least having some kind of mechanism for forwarding and structuring important content/conversations from the telegram onto our home platform.
The most obvious thing to build on is Alice - https://alicebot.netlify.app

We started working on it during the EU vs Virus massive hackathon. Then it was specifically thought of a tool for frontline corona responders and community coordination in response to this post: Epistemic resilience of the medical community: a proposal that just came through

If anyone has time to help finish the work it would help fix several things that simply don’t work with proprietary click trigger social media. We can beta test it till we find a nice approach, good UX and community management practices etc…

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ping @MariaEuler maybe something for the IOH to hack away at?

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We can make a post there and see if people get into it.

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Hmmmm don’t know how can I help, apart from testing it and sharing some ideas. I do know plenty of programmers but they are all too busy at the moment and too expensive :sweat_smile:

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well, put out a post here: