I follow a number of official programming language accounts on Twitter. It is a good way to keep up to date with what's happening in those communities and I imagine many people do the same thing.

Something I've noticed is that D is relatively silent on this front. At least on Twitter, it gives an impression that the D community is less active than it is.

For comparison:

@rustlang:
32.7k followers
12.7k tweets

@D_Programming:
10.1k followers
1k tweets

10,000 is a lot of people to reach, and 1k tweets over 8 years is too little to seem engaging.

Some suggestions:

* Post everything that happens from the Announce forum. https://twitter.com/dlang_ng does this, but it has effectively no followers. A bot could do this.
* Subscribe to #dlang on twitter and retweet anything good. Not only does this highlight interesting D-related content, but also gives others incentive to discuss #dlang there.

I don't know who runs the account, but I think both of these should be quite easy to achieve with little effort. Of course, it is easy to be generous with others' time :-)

On Thursday, 23 August 2018 at 22:49:32 UTC, Peter Alexander wrote:
> For comparison:
>
> @rustlang:
> 32.7k followers
> 12.7k tweets
>
> @D_Programming:
> 10.1k followers
> 1k tweets
>
> 10,000 is a lot of people to reach, and 1k tweets over 8 years is too little to seem engaging.

Fair point. Thanks for bringing this up!
It's worth noting that Rust has full-time paid people working on "community engineering".

> Some suggestions:
>
> * Post everything that happens from the Announce forum. https://twitter.com/dlang_ng does this, but it has effectively no followers. A bot could do this.

It's already automated and doing this automatically with the trusted account is risky as everyone can post to NG.annouce. However, every new blog entry does get posted on Twitter and Facebook (not sure whether that's automated).

BTW we also have @dlangbot (https://twitter.com/dlangbot) which tweets about every merged PR, but I think somehow no one knows about this.

> * Subscribe to #dlang on twitter and retweet anything good. Not only does this highlight interesting D-related content, but also gives others incentive to discuss #dlang there.

AFAICT this is already been done and the official Twitter account regularly retweets important #dlang tweets.

> I don't know who runs the account, but I think both of these should be quite easy to achieve with little effort. Of course, it is easy to be generous with others' time :-)

Mike Parker (aka aldacron) is the person who currently runs it and while I agree that things could be better (they always can) I do think he does a very good job at his one-man fight for D's outreach.