Want to find ACTIVE journalists on Mastodon? This spreadsheet is just amazing. A couple days ago Martin Holland @mho posted a project of his to promote journalists. It starts with known journalism accounts from the @tchambers list, but also tracks their activity, so you can see who is actually posting regularly.
This is an absolutely wonder resource, and a great asset for the fediverse!
Collating reams of journalist accounts is a good thing.
The problem I have with most of the folks on that list is that it's almost misleading, in some respects. The old Twitter mentality is persistent with the perceptions of these journalists (that's our fault), and as a result, we get a tease and a link, and depending on the particular Fediverse platform or client we're using, we may or may not get a link preview.
The volume of journalist published information is minimal, much akin to what things like Lemmy and Kbin, HackerNews, or Reddit might afford us - and it's unnecessary. A list of external, 3rd party news resources is great, but I am here.Right here - In the Fediverse, with my Fediverse client (That's my reader), and a shitload of journalists who themselves have already migrated over. I have RSS, ActivityPub Follow and alert capabilities, and can appreciate journalists actually publishing their articles here, in the Fediverse, much more than elsewhere that I have to travel to, so to speak... and maybe hit a God damned paywall.
I think part of the problem here is that many of the journalists flowing into the Fediverse are indoctrinated with the old mastodon/twitter decrepit shortcomings that left them with little capability other than to publish elsewhere and link to it from here. I don't want to have to go somewhere else to read the things that interest me - and there's no need. All the tools are here. In the Fediverse. Now.
Most Fediverse platforms don't constrain the users and publishers like the old mastopub way of doing things. i.e., lack of #Markdown or other #Rich_Text capabilities and the inclusion of inline graphics or other multimedia file types in articles, or that persistent, cringy, paltry, 500 character limit that the draconian mastodon interfaces are constrained with, along with their inability to Quote-post. This is why the so-called #mastoforks have been so successful, overcoming many, if not most of those barriers, although they're still almost indistinguishable from the typical #mastopub interface.
We're building critical mass amongst journalists, and this is remarkable, yet we need to encourage greater awareness initiatives on just what the Fediverse platforms have to offer nowadays (and it's only getting better).
Those journalists that I've had the pleasure of admiring here have for the most part, leveraged things like one of the Misskey family of platforms with multiple link previews per post, and quite the rich formatting of their text to make their articles pop with life and entice the reader to visit.
Another issue? Many of these journalists and commentators publish their articles and provide links, but they resolve to paywall sites. I think we need to rethink our ability to, at the instance level for each and every individual user, block shit that links to paywalls. We already have several good browser plugins that do so.
The sooner we sufficiently inform the lions share of these journalists to the opportunities they have on Fediverse platforms that are more contemporary and capable than mastodon, the sooner they can get down to the business of focusing on the monetization of their repertoire here in the Fediverse (and keep ALL the money earned); in turn, we (the rest of us) get quality, original, unique content here, compelling even more folks from the world of the proprietary, privacy disrespecting, deprecated monolithic silos to come and co-exist here with us as fellow Fedizens.
Already, several Fediverse platforms enable the full immersion into the ecosystem here with facilities for monetization - either native to the platform or as a plugin. For example, one of the quickest ways for a journalist to take advantage of a "Substack", "Medium" or other popular monetized platform in the Fediverse is to merely create an account on one that provides these utilities - Like WordPress or Mitra or WriteFreely - create an account, plugin your donation/subscription payment info, and start publishing interesting, informative, original content :)
***One thing we as consumers of the news can do right now, is take the time to individually contact each person we can on this list of journalists and let them know these things. Point them to this article with a link, or to the actual resources that they can experiment with and deploy their unbridled and untapped resources to reach out and in turn themselves be reached.
I'll leave links below, to a couple of the Fediverse platforms I've referenced above. If you're viewing this post on a platform that is one of the Misskey family of forks, then you'll see the graphic below as well as all of those link previews for all of those resources.
Now that I think about it. There is a common point between mastodon and bluesky users: being very eager to defend broken and/or missing features.
masto: Hey I didn’t like quote retweets anyway
bsky: Hey I didn’t like hashtags anyway
masto: Hey let me explain you why image cropping is actually good and you’re using mastodon wrong
bsky: Nooooo. I like the 140 chars limit and breaking my message in 500 posts
masto: No, actually having DMs open by default and receiving spam is NOT a problem.
bsky: Who needs GIFs? I don’t want to see GIF on my timeline
masto: No please don’t add search, I don’t want people to find my posts (with "visibility" set to "public")
Jack fucking himself: Edit and delete are dumb
The gargron mastodon structure seems to me like a fairly large over extension of the BDFL model. In the programming language space, AFAICT, it is supplemented by package authors who end up generating half or more of the value proposition of the language, by providing features and tools the BDFL hasn't but all with decent interoperability through compatibility with the same programming language.
In the case of gargron, the reach seems to extend across a whole social media network (where, yes, mastodon is basically it's own social media platform now effectively though not formally distinct from the fediverse). From the design of a full platform software stack to the interactions and structures it allows across the network to the meta presence of the network (apps, joining and landing pages) and branding.
What scope is there for the modular development and adoption of plugins or modifications? If mastodon were a popular framwork with which you had to make a number of design choices as an admin and maybe decide (from at least a few options) on your front end of choice, then cool, having a BDFL probably works quite well there to ensure that that framework is solid and reliable.
But a BDFL for a whole frickin social network??!! I know open source people have spoken to him about governance issues. I don't know where those conversations went but I haven't heard about anything that came out of them. Given that he's now the CEO of Mastodon (see Mastodon about page), I imagine not much came out of them ... this is essentially a (non-profit) company and gargron wants to keep it that way.
For the fediverse at large, my vague sense is that the wider ecosystem needs investment. That's why I'm here on #calckey. But more broadly, the influence of #MastoPub is likely to get wider as new features (eg groups) get rolled out. Hopefully this doesn't stifle or overrule any scope for diversity and open development on the fediverse. But if it starts going that way, it will really come down to the wider community of developers and admins to come together and fork the software or invest in alternative platform and put up better organisations to manage alternative platforms.