@rzeta0 thanks for pointing this out - I'd taught myself to use the time (which I also used on Twitter) to get to the permalink, and hadn't appreciated a) that it works differently elsewhere and b) the actual UX expectation around being able to grab a permalink. Good point. As mentioned, we do have to find time to address, but thanks for surfacing further.
We ran a webinar on April 18 for creators and curators who are curious about the fediverse, have a federated Flipboard account, and don't know what to do next. Here's a link to the recording, plus the TL;DR bullet points if you don't have time to watch it.
Yesterday, we announced our federation of 400 Flipboard curators and curators, so today, we're highlighting just a few you can follow on subjects like food, leadership, basketball, and sustainable food systems.
Allen Westly, technology enthusiast, cybersecurity practitioner, and diversity advocate — @West1118
Brian Fanzo, digital futurist, podcaster and ADHD advocate — @iSocialFanz
Camille Styles, lifestyle writer passionate about plant-based cooking and design and beauty — @CamilleStyles
Christie Vanover, champion pitmaster and creator of Girls Can Grill — @GirlsCanGrill
Daniel Hakimi, style curator and men’s fashion writer — @DanHakimi
Darryl Benjamin, educator and advocate for sustainable food systems — @Kafkaturtle
Janette Speyer, professional marketer passionate about cooking, travel, fashion and connecting the Flipboard community — @JanetteSpeyer
Jennifer Petoff, travel writer and creator of Sidewalk Safari — @sidewalksafari
Jessica Bethel, Los Angeles-based photographer — @4eyedgirl
Ken Yeung, journalist and author of "The AI Economy" newsletter — @thekenyeung
Louisa Moje, pharmacist, fashionista and foodie — @foodpluswords_
Marco Secchi, visual storyteller and photographer — @msecchi
Markus Weber, sustainable agriculture and agtech — @Maakusi
Maurizo Leo, bestselling cookbook author and creator of The Perfect Loaf — @theperfectloaf
Pete Gleason, PhD, professor, psychologist and innovator — @pgleason
Phil McKinney, technologist, author and podcaster — @philmckinney
Scott Kleinberg, OG Flipboarder and proud Apple fanboy — @scottkleinberg
Scott Monty, business leader, executive coach and podcaster — @scottmonty
Tayo Oredola, food writer and creator of Low Carb Africa — @lowcarbafrica
WBB Daily — curator who specializes in women’s basketball, passionate about growing the game — @smrice
Wesley Fryer, STEM educator and media literacy advocate — @wfryer
@HonestAndTruly That's so funny — "not another social platform" was the jumping-off point for an edition of @miaq's Fedi Curious newsletter. You can take a look at it here:
In December, we started to federate the accounts of some Flipboard publishers and in February, we introduced Magazines to the fediverse. Now, we’re taking two important steps: federating the accounts of 400 creators and expert curators; and enabling two-way communication so that new followers and fediverse activity are visible and actionable in the Flipboard app.
To learn more about this, take a look at our blogpost:
Thanks so much to everyone who has given feedback on what we’ve done so far. We welcome your thoughts and comments as we continue on our journey to fully federate Flipboard.
@deutrino Those are two popular communities on Flipboard and a natural place for us to start, but it was not intentional and a good reminder that we should diversify! There are excellent curators around photography, technology, human rights, climate and many other topics in the mix. We hope to add many more in the coming weeks and will be updating the spreadsheet as we go. You can also apply to have your own profile federated by filling in this survey:
I went thru and followed a few, now that I know the spreadsheet will be updated I'll come back and have a look at it.
would be great if it could be organized by topic, or have a field with some hint of topic in it, but I understand that might be difficult. my main concern is, having read thru the spreadsheet, I'm hoping new listings won't be added in the middle, which would mean I'd have to read the whole thing over again to find new ones!
Last month, Meta's Threads took its first step into the fediverse. @quillmatiq, aka @quillmatiq took that as his cue to experiment with how his Threads feed would look like on Mastodon. Here's what he discovered about organizing the chaos, different clients (hello @phanpy) and whether he'll cut the Threads cord when federation is complete.
What does it mean to federate your Flipboard profile? In the simplest terms, it means that whatever you curate (aka share) on Flipboard will be "syndicated" out to the fediverse with no extra effort. @miaq tests it out and breaks it down.
@mjgardner It's coming — we promise! Just making sure we slowly roll out new features so that we can get feedback from this community and tweak things as we go. It's been invaluable so far!
"As Flipboard’s head of creator community, I’m often explaining WTF the fediverse is and trying to convince creators to set up camp there. (Flipboard believes this is the future of social media.)," writes @miaq in the latest edition of our Fedi Curious newsletter. "If I’m lucky, the person is open to it, able to figure out how to get set up, and gives it a try. But more often than not, I get the digital equivalent of a blank stare and a groan — not another social platform?!" Here's her post about why creators should pay attention to what's happening here, and why the fediverse is not the same as all those other platforms.
Some prospective or new users may be turned off by unsolicited replies.
Mastodon is experimenting with a feature to dissuade people from writing them to any user in the first place.
"While we’re exploring multiple different avenues to tackle this issue, the idea we’re experimenting with today is simply reminding people when they’re about to respond to a stranger. We also believe that by showing a bit of information about the person you’re about to talk to, we can prevent some awkward situations, such as explaining something to an expert in a given field."
I was disappointed by this approach as through it #Mastodon doesn’t so much empower a user to shape their own experience as it asks someone else to shape that experience for them, guessing what the user wants it to be.
Does anyone on #SFBA have experience writing opinion pieces for local news papers? The admin team is about to attempt a draft explaining SFBA and the fediverse to a local paper audience. Ideally, in a way it could be customized to each area of the bay! I’d love to invite our neighbors to join us here 🎉
Also, I’d love to hear about your local paper so I can include them 📰 I would be super excited if you want to write it for your paper too! I’d greatly prefer to have a recommendation come from someone in the community than one of the admin team for the website 😅
Does anyone on #SFBA have experience writing opinion pieces for local news papers? The admin team is about to attempt a draft explaining SFBA and the fediverse to a local paper audience. Ideally, in a way it could be customized to each area of the bay! I’d love to invite our neighbors to join us here 🎉
Also, I’d love to hear about your local paper so I can include them too 📰 I would be super excited if you want to write it for your paper too! I’d greatly prefer to have a recommendation come from someone in the community than one of the admin team for the website 😅
As Twitter continues to experience issues (ideological and technical), people will be looking for a place to go. Would you support instances purchasing small ad campaigns on Twitter to let users know about mastodon as an alternative?
I’d love to read more about your opinion in the comments, too!
@cd24@seancorfield I guess I got hung up on sending money some place that you think people need to be evacuated from. Although I guess maybe in principle I am a bit pragmatic if I thought it would work? (not that I'm quite seeing it working even if the ads were allowed).
@cd24
I think it could be useful, but you would have to take care to make sure that it was doing more harm to Twitter than it was paying Elon money. I think getting eyes on Mastodon is always a good idea, if there really are people on Twitter who don't know about it, but let's also make sure that you're leading them to a good pipeline for signing up, because that was a major problem when the diaspora first started.
In general, try to see if you can target the ads towards people who don't already have mastodon accounts, and figure out the pain points these people have so you can address them directly in the ad. Expect to be shut down at some point, simply because we know Elon doesn't like when people advertise competitors on Twitter.
I agree with @gruber. Not federating is certainly a choice admins can make, but it's unlikely to have an impact considering that Threads is being bootstrapped off the Instagram social graph.
Would you rather keep the fediverse restricted to its current population of ~8M people or scale it to ~2.35B+?
@renwillis@tchambers@gruber I suppose that would run counter to the intentions/aspirations I had for ActivityStreams when I started the project, which was to make the web social, and for that social platform to work for all people. If we persist with several non-interoperable specs for building social apps, centralization remains a likely outcome once again.
@mastodonmigration@tchambers@spreadmastodon I think this is fantastic! The “pick your server” as the first step is absolutely a barrier to entry. It’s the most common complaint from people for why they don’t use Mastodon. Getting rid of that is huge!