🚀 We're happy to announce DW Innovation has just launched on Mastodon!
Follow us for discussions on media tech and journalism, from ideas and concepts to prototypes and unfolding trends – and ethical dilemmas. Let's dive into the world of digital media together!
THREAD: I made a series of images for an Instagram post I made about migrating to the fediverse. I figured I'd share with anyone else who wants to use, so I included some blank template versions too. DM if you'd like the Adobe Illustrator file so you can make your own edits. And please,comment if I got anything wrong so I can correct it.
The investigative newsroom I work for, @ProPublica, is raising money right now. We report on abuses of power in the public interest - stories like corruption on the Supreme Court. It was the first outlet to win a Pulitzer for web-first journalism. And if you donate through this link, you'll let our team know that Mastodon is an audience to pay attention to. https://give.propublica.org/give/346528/#!/donation/checkout?c_src=mstdn#journalism#fediverse#mastodon
Been trying this out secretly for the past few weeks — a "catch-up" timeline page. Did whole bunch of iterations, where I myself is the guinea pig, but this time reaching a point where I just got to share it out in the public.
NOT final design, still very experimental, only on my local machine
Instead of algo timeline, this is focused on data-grid-like UI for configuring exactly what I want to see.
This honestly could be another full-fledged app/client by itself 🫠
Okay, here we go! Giving social media another try with #Mastodon since I started to miss the academic community that social media used to provide for me.
I'm Nele, a #linguistics postdoc at the University of Oslo, working on the language of fake news in English. I'm also affiliated with Lund University through my work on the London–Lund Corpus 2 and spoken language.
That's (mainly) what I'll be posting about. Here we go again!
Addendum: By "nobody is pushing hate speech," I mean that no company, owner of the Social Network, can deliberately and aggressively force posts with hate speech onto users solely for the purpose of selling more ads. This does not imply that there is no hate speech - unfortunately, this is a problem that also spreads in the Fediverse, and the tools are not always adequate.
Those of you using cutesy font/display settings in your usernames — cursive, flipped, reversed order, or rotated/upside-down letters — please understand that this is aggressively hostile to users of screen reader software, which will announce each character in exhaustive, technical detail. Please don’t do this. It becomes a massive speed-bump in their timelines. If failing to use alt tags on images is passively bad, this is actively bad. #accessibility#Mastodon
All media and news outlets that are unsure if it's worth setting up a #Mastodon account because they won't get enough followers: Take a look at Ars Technica (@arstechnica).
Ars established their account fairly recently (Apr 25, 2023) and have quickly gained a large following -- 118K followers!
They actively post
Their account is verified
Their homepage has a link to their Mastodon account
It looks at the people you follow and the people they follow and ranks them by the number of follows from your followed. Hopefully you will find some people who were on here all along but who you hadn't found yet - I did.
Last night I shared two posts. The first was positive (Fred Rogers) & the second was abysmal (normalized gun violence).
On #Twitter, I suspect the latter would have garnered far more attention bc a race for publicly visible RTs, likes & follows favors promoting shock & outrage.
But here on #Mastodon, Mister Rogers wisdom was shared more widely.
This isn’t a scientific analysis but a mere observation reinforcing that social media will be what we make it. And I like this neighborhood.
I disagree with the current CEO of Mastodon about his stance on mid-sized instances. We don't want to be run in isolation, we are part of the Fediverse. "Normal users just want the default", he can repeat that as many times as he wants, it doesn't make it true because of that.
Diversity is the DNA of the Fediverse and Mastodon is just one part of the whole. Thousands of people spend their time and money to make it successful. Anyone who dismisses that and single-handedly tries to market the Fediverse as a Mastodon brand and use "crowding out" techniques to prevent users from even being encouraged to choose an instance from a diversity will ultimately fail.
I am super disappointed with the direction Mastodon Corporation is taking. If there is not enough headwind here soon, then sooner or later it will lead to a schism.
New #Mastodon merch just dropped! Responsibly sourced cotton t-shirts, enamel pins, mugs, and vinyl stickers with cute, exclusive designs! Get them while they're hot and support the development of Mastodon!
Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. I recently tracked down and interviewed a Russian hacker responsible for a series of particularly aggressive crypto spam campaigns this month that prompted several large #Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code.
A big thank you to @renchap for help with this research.
Germany’s Antidiscrimination Agency has announced it will no longer maintain a presence on X, the platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk due to “the enormous increase in trans and queer hostility, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism and other misanthropic content."
"In our opinion, X is no longer an acceptable environment for the profile of a public body.”
Deliberately friend-sized and friend-shaped, with a soft surface material and soft, squishy stuffing, you will soon be able to have a #Mastodon in your home: