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Reposting this here from the discussion in [email protected]:
There’s a real argument for a Mastodon use case for news organizations, governments, and colleges.
If they’re just seeking engagement, then they have to wait for the platform to grow. But this isn’t about that.
Many news organizations already have comment sections on their website, and they want to push out information on breaking news as quickly as possible. They need a platform to do those things. So, a lot of them use Facebook for embedded comments on the page and Xitter to breaking news. The thing is that they could use mastodon for both, and run their own instance, which would give them total control and not be at the mercy of Musk or Zuck.
Colleges use expensive proprietary messaging apps for students, clubs, and teachers that they can monitor and adjust to fit their needs. Mastodon offers that.
Governments sometimes end up in legal hot water due to freedom of information, etc. that comes with corporate social media. Mastodon offers the freedoms and controls necessary to disseminate vital information and to allow or reject posts as required by local laws.
The point is that Mastodon is an effective public facing communication system that also allows internal controls by the host.
The only publicity and marketing budget that the fediverse has is us, so any opportunity to promote it is our job. Government, education, news. These are the vital areas to promote.
There’s no need for mastodon to be in the mix here, whatever software they are using can federate directly. I know wordpress already has a plugin to do exactly that. (I have no idea what CMS major news outlets use, hopefully not wordpress)
For the news articles themselves, each of the major companies is using a major CMS system, many of them developed in house or licensed from another major media organization.
But for things like journalist microblogging, Mastodon seems like a stand-in replacement for Twitter or Threads or Bluesky, that could theoretically integrate with their existing authentication/identity/account management system that they use to provide logins, email, intranet access, publishing rights on whatever CMS they do have, etc.
Same with universities. Sure, each department might have official webpages, but why not provide faculty and students with the ability to engage on a university-hosted service like Mastodon or Lemmy?
Governments (federal, state, local) could do the same thing with official communications.
It could be like the old days of email, where people got their public facing addresses from their employer or university, and then were able to use that address relatively freely, including for personal use in many instances. In a sense, the domain/instance could show your association with that domain owner (a university or government or newspaper or company), but you were still speaking as yourself when using that service.
What proprietary messaging for colleges? Lol
YikYak, GroupMe, Ready Education, Remind, UniBuddy, Viva, etc. Etc.
Sounds incredibly dystopian to me, sort of like that whole idea of letting universities decide whether crimes on their campus are prosecuted that seems popular in the US for some weird reason.
They could spin up a Mastodon instance, but given how lousy their UK editorial department is with TERFs, it would be justifiably blocked for transphobia.
I really enjoy quite a bit of the Guardians coverage. Their staff editorial department is often infuriating to the point I often wonder if they actually work for a different news agency.
Their US and Australian divisions are solid. The UK one varies, and has some decent people, but also has a persistent infestation of TERF/SWERFs. A few high-profile ones have left after their comments became irreconcilable with the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line, but you still get regular Observer opinion columns about pronoun-mongers sexualising our children or other scare campaigns. There’s a rumour that the editor, Kath Viner, is herself a TERF and personally protecting them, though I haven’t seen any evidence one way or the other.
the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line
They’re aligned with the Liberal party, which is a centrist party which is seldom if ever progressive. The Guardian does put up some articles by progressives, on occasion, but they also publish articles by conservatives. When the Labour Party was led by Corbyn, the Guardian was consistently critical of Labour policy and bought into the rightwing press’s phony accusations that Corbyn was antisemitic. Overall, the Guardian’s core politics are those of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, as can also be seen by their lifestyle and media commentary, as well as their general smugness. And on economic matters, their coverage is utterly useless. On that, the Economist and the FT are far superior, despite their occasionally odious politics in their editorial pages.
I still read the Graun, though, since the rest of the British press is far, far worse.
I really wish running your own mastodon was as accepted as running your own email server. There’ll be no “blue check mark” problem if your company runs the server and only provides accounts to employees.
This seems like a win-win scenario for everyone involved.
I think the problem is that ActivityPub doesn’t scale as well as email does thanks to the constant need to update and cache data from each instance one of your users interacts with.
That’s exactly right.
They don’t need to do any of that. Just make an account on any instance and go forth.
If you can leave X, you can change instances if needed in the future, too.
Tbh that would put a lot of strain on someone else’s server. It’s not like they’re a small business that can’t afford a dedicated server, and each journalist could have a dedicated handle
Pretty sure if they joined mastadon.social, they’d be fine. Plus the clout for mastadon would be woth the orgs investment if it was needed, though their infrastructure would likely be fine. We’re not talking millions of viewers.
tbh Bluesky also a nice alternative as well.
You mean Future-X?
Bluesky is at risk to be bought by another Musk in the future
how many twitters can one man sell to an elmo?
We’ll have to wait and see, at least one for now ;)
BlueSky can be bought and influenced. No thanks.
BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.
Certainly, this aligns closely with the stance I express in a blog post scheduled for publication on Medium today in opposition to BlueSky. Users will likely be disheartened when BlueSky essentially replicates the characteristics of 2019-2020 Twitter. Ads suck. Centralization sucks. Millionaires and billionaires running these platforms for profit suck.
Oh gee I don’t know, maybe because it’s a shit platform run by a petulant man child.
Can you name one tech service that’s not run by a petulant man child?
Even Eugen Rochko is pretty thick skulled. Fortunately mastodon is federated, so we aren’t forced to use his instance. But the software does have many usability issues as a result of such silliness
What a fucking missed opportunity to send their users to subscribe to a replacement account (mastodon, blue sky, threads, or whatever)
They kinda do but only at the very bottom of the page:
I wouldn’t consider any of those an alternative to twitter
“no paywall”?
there never was a paywall on tG, no?
No. The have nag screens for donations, but they don’t block on principle.
disable JavaScript?
no, I’m very certain I’ve never seen one, this article certainly doesn’t have one
me neither. never
Guardian have a paywall for their mobile app, you get a quota of articles per week.
However the website which is almost identical is unlimited
For me, the page doesn’t allow me to scroll past the first sentence of the article.
Maybe it’s because I’m using mobile Firefox with uBO? I only managed to read the article through here.
i’m on mull with ubo and i can read the whole article 🤷
Not a paywall you have to pay with money per se, but they require you to have an account and be logged in to fully see a profile, a post and its comments. Same goes for Facebook.
Bluesky is the most downloaded social app at the moment. Hope they can handle the influx
Wise choice!
Years too late from the hand wringers
A couple of years late, but OK.
phyrric. barn doors and horses spring to mind.
came here to post this
Should have stayed on until musk booted them. Missed opportunity. Also X needs more counter-content, not less.
No quantity of counter-content can overcome the person who controls what posts are actually seen by other users. Staying on X can never lead to any kind of balance. Staying there only serves to prop-up the false sense of legitimacy.
To Mend and Defend, eh?
