[disclaimer: I'm what the current owner of the platform may refer to as a "disgruntled former employee"]
[qualifying statements: I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007; got my first full-time / "titled" DevRel role through having been on Twitter, in 2012; joined Twitter as an employee in March 2014; and left the platform as an employee and as a user in November 2022]
To address the question posed in the post title: absolutely DevRel can be done without Twitter! It started well before Twitter (if you date it to the ~Guy Kawasaki at Apple days), and can continue with or without Twitter.
That said, as you've rightly identified, for a long time there was a lot of strong resonance between that platform, and dev advocacy. It started as something of a niche platform for the (then) technorati so it was a great place to find other developers and follow tech events. Once search emerged / was acquired in ~2009/10 it became an even better way to find where the conversations were. In the later period it became a great megaphone for getting news out about software releases and events, and a popularity contest for a few folks as well.
In the meantime, several other things also happened:
GitHub became the predominant place where code was shared, and in tandem with that, the decentralised and OSS movements created tools like Gitlab and others with their own communities that act as a (slight) counterweight to the gravity of the GitHub galactic spiral.
there's a whole side discussion here as well about the growth of formats like Markdown to underpin both CMS and other publishing systems like Forem, as well as documentation and so on; today you're potentially expected to "speak in Markdown" as much as I thought of us as expected to "speak in (X)HTML" in the early 2000s...
IRC remained; Matrix happened; Discord and Slack happened and grew. There's a lot more expectation today that projects will have a live and active chat type community based on something like Matrix or Discord.
Reddit became... useful for things, especially search (vs the enshittification of Google results)
The Fediverse quietly grew and established itself.
This is definitely a challenge to the convenience of having a single place to go to take part in a conversation as it might be if you were on Twitter, where there's a single and mostly universal[*] search feature, as well as a single source for hashtags.
the culture of the Fediverse and Mastodon is almost explicitly the reverse of the popularity contest / public exposure-driven latter stage Twitter: you're much less likely to be greeted warmly if you slide into a conversation you discover, than on Twitter; the lack of built-in quoting (itself a later innovation on Twitter, based on usage) can make it less easy to build on existing conversations; the risk of defederation or fediblock makes it important to know your audience and be respectful.
Fundamentally, for me, a core tenet of DevRel remains: go where the community is. Don't expect to "own" the community around your Thing (product|project|technology). Earn the respect of the community, in the spaces where it has formed. You can (by all means) host your own Discourse forum or Forem instance, but that's almost certainly not the only place where folks are discussing your Thing. At Twitter, I constantly advocated for my team to be on Stack Overflow, to post on and follow others on DEV, to share via our own social profiles, to hop into the third-party Slack and Discord communities - because the Thing was wider than just "our API as delivered by us", and not everyone always wanted to join our own community forum and discuss things there.
It may be a bit more of an effort to map out where developer communities are, today, but it's also a great opportunity to learn that new platform and adapt to that new environment.
And that evolution is why I love Developer Relations (as part of "my Thing").
[*] search is not a complete index on Twitter, either in the UI or in the API, for a number of fairly nuanced technical reasons, but it's definitely good enough for DevRel use cases, and most others, barring really detailed data science which would need deeper firehose access.
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oh jeez. Now I need to post this as a post. I'll link back here!
Brian Rinaldi is a Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly with over 20 years experience as a developer for the web. Brian is active in the community running CFE.dev and Orlando Devs.
Love the feedback. Yes, please post this as a post!
Yes, DevRel started before Twitter technically, but it was still a nascent career option at the time, nothing like the explosion we've seen of DevRel over the past 5 years.
I agree with you that the lack of Twitter makes it harder for a DevRel person to find the community, which is fragmented into a lot of places (Fediverse, multiple Discords, multiple Slack communities, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.). In my view, it is worth it, both in terms of adhering to my own values but also in terms of expanding my horizons. I do understand though why it is such a difficult choice for some folks to make.
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We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
[disclaimer: I'm what the current owner of the platform may refer to as a "disgruntled former employee"]
[qualifying statements: I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007; got my first full-time / "titled" DevRel role through having been on Twitter, in 2012; joined Twitter as an employee in March 2014; and left the platform as an employee and as a user in November 2022]
To address the question posed in the post title: absolutely DevRel can be done without Twitter! It started well before Twitter (if you date it to the ~Guy Kawasaki at Apple days), and can continue with or without Twitter.
That said, as you've rightly identified, for a long time there was a lot of strong resonance between that platform, and dev advocacy. It started as something of a niche platform for the (then) technorati so it was a great place to find other developers and follow tech events. Once search emerged / was acquired in ~2009/10 it became an even better way to find where the conversations were. In the later period it became a great megaphone for getting news out about software releases and events, and a popularity contest for a few folks as well.
In the meantime, several other things also happened:
Fundamentally, for me, a core tenet of DevRel remains: go where the community is. Don't expect to "own" the community around your Thing (product|project|technology). Earn the respect of the community, in the spaces where it has formed. You can (by all means) host your own Discourse forum or Forem instance, but that's almost certainly not the only place where folks are discussing your Thing. At Twitter, I constantly advocated for my team to be on Stack Overflow, to post on and follow others on DEV, to share via our own social profiles, to hop into the third-party Slack and Discord communities - because the Thing was wider than just "our API as delivered by us", and not everyone always wanted to join our own community forum and discuss things there.
It may be a bit more of an effort to map out where developer communities are, today, but it's also a great opportunity to learn that new platform and adapt to that new environment.
And that evolution is why I love Developer Relations (as part of "my Thing").
[*] search is not a complete index on Twitter, either in the UI or in the API, for a number of fairly nuanced technical reasons, but it's definitely good enough for DevRel use cases, and most others, barring really detailed data science which would need deeper firehose access.
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...
oh jeez. Now I need to post this as a post. I'll link back here!
Here you go!
Thoughts on Dev Rel in the post-Twitter era
Andy Piper ・ Feb 22 ・ 7 min read
Love the feedback. Yes, please post this as a post!
Yes, DevRel started before Twitter technically, but it was still a nascent career option at the time, nothing like the explosion we've seen of DevRel over the past 5 years.
I agree with you that the lack of Twitter makes it harder for a DevRel person to find the community, which is fragmented into a lot of places (Fediverse, multiple Discords, multiple Slack communities, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.). In my view, it is worth it, both in terms of adhering to my own values but also in terms of expanding my horizons. I do understand though why it is such a difficult choice for some folks to make.