(1/12) How I fell in love with social media & the EU, and made that my whole career, a thread.
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(1/12) How I fell in love with social media & the EU, and made that my whole career, a thread.
This isn’t TikTok (thankfully), but let’s do a bit of *Storytime* anyway.
I’m Hannah and I’m a social media manager for the EU.
Sometimes I still can’t believe that’s my real job.@hpod16 I read a thread by someone brave enough to make a few though choices , to find a place and role you like. Great read!
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@zotheca That's in my opinion a general challenge on the Fediverse with private run servers and no unified consent e.g. on the minimum info that should be provided that state "... is a privately run...".
Don't get me wrong, I love the Fediverse and that everyone, who wants to, can run their own little or bigger space, but this shows there should be ways for us to verify those.
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(10/12) In 2018 I went back to University, joined a political party and started campaigning for the 2019 European Elections. When COVID hit in 2020 I was between graduating from my Masters in Eastern European Studies (
Slava Ukraini) and doing yet another internship, this time with a Member of the European Parliament. Doing social media to get votes was definitely different from communicating on behalf of an institution...@hpod16 have you actually been to #Ukraine? And if yes, how many times?
Me personally (the 1. time) in late 2013, right after visiting
. Crossed the border and visited #Lviv. Had a remote friend there, which I gave a brief visit. Only then started to realize, Maidan protests started in #Kyiv!It's roughly since then, when I started (or maybe just intensified) fighting
propaganda, along with the far-right and fossil ones.Wished I had a chance to visit the southern east of
! -
@leanderlindahl @tizianomattei @oelschle
Is there some way to see what the most popular posts on Mastodon are in a given week?
Asking because of the EU account, not my personal one.
@hpod16
There are some stats you may find interesting here, though I'm not sure you'll find what you're looking for: fedidb.com
@oelschle @leanderlindahl -
@hpod16 I read a thread by someone brave enough to make a few though choices , to find a place and role you like. Great read!
@sandorspruit I had a lot more luck than bravery, I would say. And besides, what else was I going to do? Be a lawyer? I don't think so. (I don't think any law firm would have hired me).
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@hpod16
There are some stats you may find interesting here, though I'm not sure you'll find what you're looking for: fedidb.com
@oelschle @leanderlindahl@tizianomattei @oelschle @leanderlindahl
Thanks, I'm adding this to my "knowledge about the fediverse" collection -
(11/12) Since 2023, I work for the European Commission (again). I mainly do community management, which means I spend a lot of time in the comments. It’s not always the easiest place to be. I’ve deprioritised my personal social media, and I’ve had to learn to manage my relationship to addictive apps and algorithms. Geopolitics play a bigger and bigger role for the EU, and that reflects on social media too. More people are asking themselves: can we still rely on the US and American tech giants?
@hpod16
Thank you for the long introduction!I hope you are up for a lot of comments in here then, this is the most conversational social media I have experienced outside of chat services (I grew up on IRC in the late 90s and 00s).
And I've seen a lot of people with Opinions about what the EU should and shouldn't do.
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@everton137 oh no, no no, We don't want to dig up my cringy blogs from my teen years and early 20s.
Let sleeping dogs lie - and let tumblr blogs fade into the ether of old internet servers...@hpod16 @eupolicy.social Haha, that's when the internet was fun!
When I quit my particle physics studies in Brazil, I started working on a social network project that used blogs to share scientific and educational knowledge. This took place between 2006 and 2009 at the largest university in South America.
The idea was to create a decentralized social media platform for research and educational centers that could communicate with each other.
That dream was ahead of its time, but today I see it's happening!
At that time, I learned a lot from blogs and early social media. There were great forums with healthy discussions.
I remember making a friend who told me how she came out. She was a biologist, and I was a physicist. It was interesting to learn about the subject, see the emotions behind the screens, and then become friends in real life.
In Brazil, I saw many cases where people used internet forums to realize that there was nothing wrong with being themselves.
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@sandorspruit I had a lot more luck than bravery, I would say. And besides, what else was I going to do? Be a lawyer? I don't think so. (I don't think any law firm would have hired me).
@hpod16 Hey, it’s a compliment!
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@hpod16 have you actually been to #Ukraine? And if yes, how many times?
Me personally (the 1. time) in late 2013, right after visiting
. Crossed the border and visited #Lviv. Had a remote friend there, which I gave a brief visit. Only then started to realize, Maidan protests started in #Kyiv!It's roughly since then, when I started (or maybe just intensified) fighting
propaganda, along with the far-right and fossil ones.Wished I had a chance to visit the southern east of
!@BrennpunktUA yes! First with the European Youth Parliament.
I went to a conference in Feb 2013 and made plenty of friends who were later protesting on Maidan Square. Ivano Frankivsk. I went back in 2014 and 2015, for EYP sessions that were actually Belarusian conferences, but since EYP was banned in Belarus, they often held their sessions in Lviv. And then During my master I went for a wedding and to visit a friend in Kyiv. Oh, and to the European Lesbian Conference in 2019, that was wild... -
@leanderlindahl @oelschle @hpod16 yes, checking what other people say is a must do in 2026.
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@leanderlindahl @oelschle @hpod16 yes, checking what other people say is a must do in 2026.
@lexinova @leanderlindahl @oelschle
I'll take it, thank youuuuu -
@BrennpunktUA well it also does sound a lot like an iPod, but with H
and it's short which was handy for twitter (remember when the max was 140 characters? I used to be a wizard at shortening sentences, because i had to translate 140 character tweets from English to German)@hpod16 hahaha yes, here it's 500 characters (on most, but not all servers, infosec.exchange allows for 5.000), but I still sometimes try to squeeze as much as possible into it
Reminds me when I started doing this with the old-fashioned SMS.Or when I used to optimize GIFs to fit 10 or 20 Kilobytes as a youngster (even won an GIF award back then!)
And I've always been very impressed by the 4kb and the 64kb PC "intros" out there – you do know them, right? -
@hpod16 hahaha yes, here it's 500 characters (on most, but not all servers, infosec.exchange allows for 5.000), but I still sometimes try to squeeze as much as possible into it
Reminds me when I started doing this with the old-fashioned SMS.Or when I used to optimize GIFs to fit 10 or 20 Kilobytes as a youngster (even won an GIF award back then!)
And I've always been very impressed by the 4kb and the 64kb PC "intros" out there – you do know them, right?@hpod16 about your username: my first guess was indeed Hannah + iPod
you're an apple fan? (I'm not) -
@hpod16 aahhh that’s where you got your handle from
@superuserdo
"To be or not to be, that is the question, whether 'tis nobler
in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against
a sea of struggles
and by opposing
- end them"Or something like that... I should really look it up again.
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@superuserdo
"To be or not to be, that is the question, whether 'tis nobler
in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against
a sea of struggles
and by opposing
- end them"Or something like that... I should really look it up again.
@hpod16 Gotcha
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@hpod16 hahaha yes, here it's 500 characters (on most, but not all servers, infosec.exchange allows for 5.000), but I still sometimes try to squeeze as much as possible into it
Reminds me when I started doing this with the old-fashioned SMS.Or when I used to optimize GIFs to fit 10 or 20 Kilobytes as a youngster (even won an GIF award back then!)
And I've always been very impressed by the 4kb and the 64kb PC "intros" out there – you do know them, right?@BrennpunktUA but I like the limitations.
I like character limits for the same reason I like Sonnets in Poetry.
There's only one strict way to write a sonnet, and yet hundreds of thousands have been written, one more creative than the next.
Maybe 140 characters was too little, but something about being given a limit makes me want to push it. Get the most out of the few characters I have.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...? -
@BrennpunktUA yes! First with the European Youth Parliament.
I went to a conference in Feb 2013 and made plenty of friends who were later protesting on Maidan Square. Ivano Frankivsk. I went back in 2014 and 2015, for EYP sessions that were actually Belarusian conferences, but since EYP was banned in Belarus, they often held their sessions in Lviv. And then During my master I went for a wedding and to visit a friend in Kyiv. Oh, and to the European Lesbian Conference in 2019, that was wild...@hpod16
️
Ukraine even held CSDs during wartime, I don't know for the last two years, though. RuZZian attacks continue to intensify each year 
I've been back to Ukraine in 2015 and in 2016, both times in Kyiv, 1 time for the job (solar PV)
In early 2022, our small initiative against right-wing extremism collected money for 5 small camera drones for
. Not much, but all we were able to afford. Yet, at a very early stage. There have been other, much larger drone campaigns, after (not ours). -
@BrennpunktUA but I like the limitations.
I like character limits for the same reason I like Sonnets in Poetry.
There's only one strict way to write a sonnet, and yet hundreds of thousands have been written, one more creative than the next.
Maybe 140 characters was too little, but something about being given a limit makes me want to push it. Get the most out of the few characters I have.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...?@hpod16 sometimes limits force us to go beyond limits! Imagine car producers had to fulfill a max. weight of let's say 1 ton and a max. consumption of let's say 10 kWh (
) per 100 km – they could achieve it (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loremo). -
@hpod16 sometimes limits force us to go beyond limits! Imagine car producers had to fulfill a max. weight of let's say 1 ton and a max. consumption of let's say 10 kWh (
) per 100 km – they could achieve it (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loremo).
