Seems like the right approach to start their own server, instead of making accounts on some of the flagship instances, which only perpetuates the centralisation dogma.
It also does away with some of the really awkward practices news organizations engage in wrt social media. The number of @JournalistNameCBC handles out there is kind of super cringy, and seems to point to journos having company-specific/company-mandated social media accounts, but without any actual company support for them.
Something like this makes having a company-mandated social media account something they’re assigned, just like an email address, rather than something they’re personally responsible for.
What I’d love to see is news companies spinning up their own instances, for example, a CBC-owned Mastodon instance, with accounts such as journalistname@cbcnews. It’d work exactly like a company-assigned e-mail address, and would function as such. That each and every post on such an account would be seen as the journalist working under the company, and not their own personal views.
And if a journalist wants his own personal account, well, they can either spin up their own instance, or perhaps a union of journalists would spin up an instance, with journalists setting up their accounts that are not tied to any news agency or company.
Am I being too naive and optimistic here? Maybe. But do I want this to happen regardless, yes!
Upon reading the article more closely, this is what the BBC is doing. My bad!
When I joined Mastodon in the November migration, I wondered why media organisations weren’t spinning up their own servers. Give all the journos an account on that server and there’s your verification right away.
Because a company/org specific site for journalists doesn’t get the interactions with people outside that org but within the sector of coverage unless people do a lot of following of others.
Local isn’t a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.
The global stream isn’t a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn’t going to be as effective as on generalist servers.
But then, search isn’t super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.
There’s nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.
Does it make sense for NPR to spin up their own instance with the additional administration and server costs? Or is it a better use of their money just to have an account on a larger instance… which also makes discovery of them easier (everyone on mstdn.social sees them in the local feed and relevant hashtags without having to specifically follow them on other servers).
The local mastodon instance helps with authenticity, but hinders the discovery of the “buzz” in local of an appropriately topical instance ( https://mastodon.energy/explore ).
The hashtag #fossilfuels works… but it doesn’t work as well as being in https://mastodon.energy/public/local were things without hashtags exist and all the content is topical.
No of course not everyone or every organisation has the means for that. But those that have should, and others should fan out over different instances: local or regional ones, or thematic ones, instead of congregating on the same three instances because it’s ‘the main one’.
Seems like the right approach to start their own server, instead of making accounts on some of the flagship instances, which only perpetuates the centralisation dogma.
It also does away with some of the really awkward practices news organizations engage in wrt social media. The number of @JournalistNameCBC handles out there is kind of super cringy, and seems to point to journos having company-specific/company-mandated social media accounts, but without any actual company support for them.
Something like this makes having a company-mandated social media account something they’re assigned, just like an email address, rather than something they’re personally responsible for.
What I’d love to see is news companies spinning up their own instances, for example, a CBC-owned Mastodon instance, with accounts such as
journalistname@cbcnews. It’d work exactly like a company-assigned e-mail address, and would function as such. That each and every post on such an account would be seen as the journalist working under the company, and not their own personal views.And if a journalist wants his own personal account, well, they can either spin up their own instance, or perhaps a union of journalists would spin up an instance, with journalists setting up their accounts that are not tied to any news agency or company.
Am I being too naive and optimistic here? Maybe. But do I want this to happen regardless, yes!
Upon reading the article more closely, this is what the BBC is doing. My bad!
Yep. It’s one pattern that I think really sells the federated social media idea.
You love to see it.
Hopefully this becomes more normalised. The idea that a company runs their own site, but not social now seems a bit backward.
Wait, so if I just make an account on twitter named @PeterRothenburgCBC, then everyone thinks I am a legit reporter?
As long as you pay for a blue checkmark, sure.
When I joined Mastodon in the November migration, I wondered why media organisations weren’t spinning up their own servers. Give all the journos an account on that server and there’s your verification right away.
Because a company/org specific site for journalists doesn’t get the interactions with people outside that org but within the sector of coverage unless people do a lot of following of others.
Compare https://mastodon.energy/public/local with https://social.bbc/public/local
Journalists want the first - not the second.
But note also that the first one isn’t associated with a media organization but rather an industry sector.
You can use https://social.bbc/ to broadcasts articles that people want to read, but the “what is going on with the energy grid in the UK” will never show up in local there but rather over at https://mastodon.energy/@EarthOrgUK … and so that’s where the journalists are… though there’s still a lot going on over at https://twitter.com/search?q=%23energytwitter
Local isn’t a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.
The global stream isn’t a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn’t going to be as effective as on generalist servers.
But then, search isn’t super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.
There’s nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.
Some companies do it. For example, https://toot.thoughtworks.com/explore
Not every organization has the financial resources to stand up their own instance though.
https://mstdn.social/@NPR
Does it make sense for NPR to spin up their own instance with the additional administration and server costs? Or is it a better use of their money just to have an account on a larger instance… which also makes discovery of them easier (everyone on mstdn.social sees them in the local feed and relevant hashtags without having to specifically follow them on other servers).
The local mastodon instance helps with authenticity, but hinders the discovery of the “buzz” in local of an appropriately topical instance ( https://mastodon.energy/explore ).
Hashtags work across instances…
The hashtag #fossilfuels works… but it doesn’t work as well as being in https://mastodon.energy/public/local were things without hashtags exist and all the content is topical.
No of course not everyone or every organisation has the means for that. But those that have should, and others should fan out over different instances: local or regional ones, or thematic ones, instead of congregating on the same three instances because it’s ‘the main one’.