Social Media and DrupalCamp Cemaes
As I had a bit of a scroll on Mastodon earlier after my lunch I saw a few people talking about how Bluesky registration was now open to the general public. Bluesky, or Bluesky Social, is a social network, somewhat known for it’s involvement with Jack Dorsey, one of the Twitter founders. Up until today it was only accessed by invite only. After having just posted the Code of Conduct for the event earlier in the day that got me thinking about sharing a bit of info on how DrupalCamp Cemaes is going to use social media for the event and the reasoning behind my decisions.
When announcing the event on the drupal.community Mastodon instance, I mentioned that the DrupalCamp Cemaes Mastodon account would be the only official social network presence for the event. Part of me thinks this is a pretty foolish thing to do. I’m organising this event on my own and I realise that trying to reach enough people to publicise the event without corporate social media involved is going to be an uphill battle. But after making the decision to leave my own personal, and professional, Twitter account some time ago (it wasn’t called X then) I wanted to focus on Mastodon for the event since the decentralised, community, and open source nature of the platform seem to align with the values of the Drupal project and community. For the record, my Twitter account hasn’t been deleted, just abandoned, at some point I’ll probably post a final message there about where to find me now.
The code of conduct for DrupalCamp Cemaes is taken from the Drupal event Code of Conduct template. This is the standard for all Drupal events, big or small. These are the sorts of rules and ideals that the Drupal project stands for, and something that I’ve been proud to be a part of since going to my first Drupal event way back in 2011. I don’t believe the CoC existed then, but I certainly found a tolerant and accepting community at a time in my life when I was quite nervous about attending such events. While it’s just a set of terms for Drupal events, which covers more than a few topics, it also in my mind does a lot to stand up against bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all of the other evils that are often tolerated, promoted, and monetised on commercial social media and other big online platforms.
It draws a line in the sand that says these things aren't allowed at Drupal events. The drupal.community Mastodon instance also subscribes to the same code of conduct. One of the nice things about Mastodon is that other instances can be blocked from federating completely by server admins if other instances don’t share the same values. This allows our community to exist freely and safely without harassment or violence being sent our way. We get to choose what behaviour is acceptable online just like we get to choose what behaviour is acceptable at our events. Commercial social media doesn’t work that way.
Commercial social media more often than not seems to encourage the worst people to engage in the worst behaviour. Their values are purely about engagement, sales, and more and more often these days stealing as much as they can from their users to sell to advertisers or train their “AI” models. Their terms and conditions claim ownership of your content. And one of the biggest players, Twitter, now X, is owned by someone who has demonstrated time and time again that their values don’t align with those of the Drupal community, or the Drupal event code of conduct.
Yes, these platforms do tout their own moderation policies, which seem to be more about public relations or pleasing regulators rather than trying to foster safe online spaces. So as their values don’t align with ours, I’ve decided not to play in their playground, or help their platforms succeed by feeding them information about the event, or expecting individuals interested in the event to have to join or log on to platforms that don’t share our community values.
As a one person show organising the event, these are my ideals that I’m taking into the event. These ideals are in no way a reflection on anyone else’s choices to use other social networks in their own personal or professional lives, nor do I expect anyone else to agree with my decisions on how to promote the event online. I don’t expect other people to refrain from posting about the event on other social networks, or to stop using them while at the event. My point here is that for this event, there will be no official X account, there will be no official Bluesky account, and there will be no official event or page on Facebook. I just wanted to explain a bit as to why.