Announcing new venues on a social media

[popey]

When a venue is added, we could draw attention to it with an automated post on social media.

We have accounts already on Mastodon and BlueSky.

There is an RSS feed on the site that could be very quickly and easily leveraged with a bot to send new sites to those social accounts. (I already operate a bot that does this for several Ubuntu RSS feeds - e.g., AskUbuntu.)

I worry that if we post every new venue as a social post, we might be a bit spammy, especially when multiple venues are added in succession (e.g. today I merged eleven new venues over 10 minutes (I intentionally spread them out a bit - e.g. for f in {791..802}; do gh pr merge $f -m -d; sleep 60; done)).

Perhaps a quick and easy solution is to rate-limiit the bot to one new venue per N-minutes/hour/day/week/month (delete as applicable), at a slow enough rate that the funnel of new venues doesn't get exhausted, but not too slow that 'new' venues get posted weeks after they were merged?

Maybe the bot could just randomly select venues that have been added in the last N minutes/hours/days/weeks/months, check that they haven't already been posted, and post them.

Whatever cadence is chosen, it would be sensible to include:

• Venue name
• A picture/render either from the page (We don't currently have any)
• A generated image of the OSM region around the venue
• A summarized version of the venue description
• Link to the venue page
• #NerdyDayTrips hashtag
• Venue country flag emoji

WDYT?

[mcphail]

I think there's no point following the account unless it is going to post something, but I wouldn't want it dominating my feed. Perhaps aim for a couple of automated posts per day (maybe one new and one classic)? Human written posts would be in addition to this.

[popey]

I've settled on 4 posts per day, and it's been running like that for a while. Do we think that's too many?

[mcphail]

I've been enjoying the current cadence.