DevRel in the era of “Community Everywhere”
Tags: community, devrel, mastodon
Published: 2023-10-06 13:36:37

---
title: DevRel in the era of “Community Everywhere”
published: true
date: 2023-10-06 11:26:37 UTC
tags: community,devrel,mastodon
canonical_url: https://andypiper.co.uk/2023/10/06/devrel-in-the-era-of-community-everywhere/
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/fg4e4i3zc2nynjnqydio.jpeg
---

Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to the [Dublin #DevRel Meetup](https://www.devrelmeetup.com/), organised by my friends at [Voxgig](https://www.voxgig.com/) – all about _Developer Relations in the era of “Community Everywhere”_. I covered a range of the current and emerging social platforms where we can connect with our communities, and later in the session I talked more specifically about what’s new in Mastodon 4.2.

What is “Community Everywhere”? Well, it’s [something that Richard Millington wrote about not too long ago](https://www.feverbee.com/communityeverywhere/). As I cover in the talk, [not everyone believes that this is something new](https://adrianspeyer.substack.com/p/the-community-everywhere-buzzword) – but, as [I’ve written about before myself](https://dev.to/godspowercuche/thoughts-on-dev-rel-in-the-post-twitter-era-4m46-temp-slug-9114130), a core responsibility of a Developer Relations professional is to go where the developers are, and as there are [a number of new platforms](https://dev.to/andypiper/when-social-networks-are-like-pokemon-5615-temp-slug-8256090) around at the moment, it’s an opportunity to learn, explore, and get comfortable with some different tools and ways of communicating.

A small hiccup meant that after about the 5th slide the presentation was no longer being shared into the online recording, but the [full slide deck is here](https://speakerdeck.com/andypiper/developer-relations-in-the-era-of-community-everywhere) if you want to follow along with the talk, and I’ve also got a set of [notes and links for the talk online](https://pipr.co/devrel-ece).

Here’s the video.

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl72q_ZLz_4 %}

The organisers also invited me to talk about the [new release of Mastodon, version 4.2](https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/09/mastodon-4.2/). This is the first major version to have come out since I started helping the team, and it’s a pretty big deal as it introduces a few major features that folks have been looking for, notably _opt-in search_. In the second part of my section of the meetup, I talked a bit about version 4.2, and also shared a few tools that I use regularly that give me additional features and ways to keep up with the conversations around the communities I want to connect with. The notes are again available at the same link posted above.

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXks_mt3laY %}

tl;dr (aka didn’t watch / or check the notes) – there are a few third-party apps and tools that I use regularly to help me to stay up-to-date. In particular, I love (and choose to pay for) [Murmel](https://murmel.social) and [fediview](https://fediview.com) which email me daily summaries of links or conversations I might otherwise miss in the reverse-chronological timeline. I also use some browser extensions that add a few niceties to the experience, such as [Graze](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/graze-for-mastodon/epocinhmkcnjfjobnglchpbncndobblj) and [Streetpass](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/streetpass-for-mastodon/fphjfedjhinpnjblomfebcjjpdpakhhn).

Thanks to Sinead and Richard for having me talk at the meetup, and for continuing to support the DevRel community with great content each month – there’s also a [good podcast from Voxgig](https://www.voxgig.com/podcast) that you should check out.