We have been using Twitter (https://twitter.com/3dslicerapp) to give updates and get feedback about Slicer from people who are not members of this forum. However, recent issues (instability problems, requirement of paid subscription for basic features, etc.) and general uncertainty about directions where Twitter is going makes us think about alternatives.
What would be your preferred social media platform for getting and posting updates about 3D Slicer? (you can mark up to 3)
It seems that there is an agreement that LInkedIn would serve this community better.
I had a number of positive experiences on LinkedIn recently. Most importantly, discussions seem to be more meaningful there. Maybe due to that discussions around posts are organized into threads, or just people are in a different mindset when browsing linkedin?
Twitter/X further degraded since the start of the discussion with its haphazard rename to X, practically no moderation, uncertainty about tweetdeck.
To secure a place for Slicer on LinkedIn, we would need to create a company page (linkedin.com/company/slicer) or educationsl page (linkedin.com/school/slicer) or showcase (linkedin.com/showcare/slicer) page as a starting point. Since Slicer is neither a company (unless we mean “company” as a “team”), a “showcase” page might be the best choice, but that must be associated with a company page.
While I agree twitter is definitely going down the hill, there is still a good presence of academic presence on Twitter that is hard to find in any other social media. Everyone who is trying to do outreach is struggling with that fact. Out of those options, linkedin was my vote, but it remains very industry and commercial centered in terms of audience (e.g., I am not aware of any biologist in my circle who is active there beyond job postings).
So my suggestions is while moving away functions from twitter to Linked in, please to try to make an effort to support (double post, at least selectively) for a while until a solution emerges.
Thanks for organizing this. I like the idea of creating a “company” on linkedin but doing must of the messaging as a “showcase” and cross-post to as many other sites as feasible.
There is a Slicer company page on linkedin already: Slicer | LinkedIn
There is no content on it, it seems to be just a placeholder with a Slicer logo and web address.
Based on my personal experience, LinkedIn actually already provides much wider audience and more meaningful discussions than Twitter. For example, the TotalSegmentator Slicer extension post (Twitter/LinkedIn) analytics on the two platforms:
Twitter
LinkedIn
Number of impressions
89,904
353,756
Comments
20
155
Likes
1,030
4,102
Reposts
266
251
7x more people saw the post on LinkedIn, 8x more comments were posted, with 4x more reactions.
See a recent article about the decline of Twitter in the scientific community. According to the article, most people go to Mastodon and LinkedIn. Even signing up for Mastodon is non-trivial and then the whole distributed system is quite hard to grasp, so I don’t really see where else people could go if not to LinkedIn.
I agree that we could keep reposting to Twitter for a while. Unfortunately, that’s practically no longer that easy. Tweetdeck - the tool that allowed multiple administrators to post/report/like content as @3dslicerapp - is now gone. There is some new version but it requires premium subscription. I would not feel completely comfortable posting on Twitter anymore anyway, but I definitely would not want to pay for the privilege. So, as far as I’m concerned, I think I’m done with Twitter.