hey #fediverse
so I’ve been thinking about this for a long time
at some point yr humble fediverse servant is going to get called into a meeting to justify how I am spending my time over here
& I suspect saying “listen this is the most fun I’ve had on social media since early Tumblr” is not the move
This is all to say: if you want local #news here, follow us 😁.
If we get this working I think other news orgs. will follow.
@gbhnews A couple examples:
https://mastodon.social/@jhpot/109586719680488363
https://journa.host/@spencerdailey/109742163296310876
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/twitter-tumbleweed-watch
There’s another one I know of that I can’t find right now
Attached: 4 images Wanna hear a fun bit of social trivia? Recently, @[email protected]'s posts on Mastodon are far more likely to break 50 Boosts/RTs than their tweet counterparts. The latest four examples: 67 boosts, 84 likes (vs 7 RTs, 14 likes) 69 boosts, 107 likes (vs 12 RTs, 24 likes) 221 boosts, 201 likes (vs 87 RTs, 80 likes) 135 boosts, 163 likes (vs 4 RTs, 5 likes) These aren't cherry picked either--over this time, there was only one 50+ RT tweet vs four toots (averaging 123 boosts). Two aren't even Elon related.
@gbhnews Lots of folks won't follow you unless you CW.
This isn't as stupid as it might sound. Folks want to control *when* they see news (not the lighthearted stuff, maybe, but the stuff that might make them down). And folks want to boost news, but their followers will certainly complain if it's not CWd – after all, they didn't follow you.
CWing a post isn't hiding it. It's almost a reflex to click on it. It just stops you seeing it out of the corner of your eye.
My 10c.
@unclepj @gbhnews
There isn't really a standard, and I suppose there couldn't be really.
Most folks who care about CW think you should CW news. But they don't really mean lighthearted stuff, they mean what I call "doom". (Lots of us don't want to be surprised by, eg, another headline about how the PM is planning a new torture chamber for refugees.)
I happen to think you should say upfront what you will CW in your profile. But, new idea.
@werefreeatlast @gbhnews
AKA "content warning".
Politeness here suggests that if you have something that some readers might want to take a second to prepare for, you should use one.
Also good for spoilers, punchlines…
@FindingHobbes You're the best. ⭐️
And I do think engagement is deeper/more genuine here. For now, since Mastodon doesn't have the kind of analytics other social platforms do, follower count is the only hard number I can share with peers in other newsrooms or people here at GBH.
Numbers aren't everything, especially in public media, thank goodness. But when we make decisions about limited resources they are *a* factor.
@gbhnews Go get Analytodon (@analytodon), try the 60-day trial and pull the numbers together. Management wants concrete evidence of change over time and analytics will help.
Here's a fuzzier bit of data: I live in Michigan, have no reason to follow a Boston news outlet, and yet I do because GBH provides news and insight I'm not getting elsewhere, mostly because GBH is on the leading edge. Other media outlets will have to play catch-up to get to where GBH is now, and that includes influence.
@gbhnews I live in CT, and follow you because you do the polls and have light-hearted news updates in the mornings. For the news, I would also appreciate a CW as I need to prep myself for that. So maybe 3 separate posts in the morning: poll, light-hearted updates, and CW news.
Keep up the good work!!
@RichSPK Me too I love it here!
I'll talk to Sam. Margery and Jim will be here in a kind of way? I livestream them on Friday and they do take questions from/react to people talking in the livestream chat.
@gbhnews
Oh! you have to write your own, then? There isn't one in the open software?
I'm still feeling my way around on the #Fediverse. I had imagined you would only need to feed it select items, like marketing source, article number, issue number.🤔
@gbhnews A case to make for the business types, too - for an organization, having an instance with a domain name is the blue check of the Fediverse. Since you're on mastodon.social, you could be faking. Probably not, but you could be.
In addition, you would have the sweet traffic metrics, directly, that your bean counters so earnestly desire. Having accounts per-show would segment your metrics appropriately. There's really all kinds of wins to be had here.
@dl Yes! I work in public media, so we're not as relentlessly numbers-focused as commercial media is. But we do try to be good stewards of the resources that our members give us via supporting us. I mean, even one server is a whole lotta tote bags! (Sorry, had to get an NPR joke in there somewhere).
I feel like I signed up to get on the waiting list for some Mastodon analytics app...shucks, now I forget the name. It will come to me.
@gbhnews Ooooh. This is a really juicy question... and my thoughts are probably pretty scattered on this at the moment, so do follow up if I say something confusing.
So, if I was on the team at GBH, the way I'd want to be thinking about the Fediverse, at the moment, is to be thinking about what the best ways to implement ActivityPub (the underlying protocol behind Mastodon, and all the other Fediverse software projects) into the organization in a way that's a more powerful and organic tool to the way journalists want to do their job because that's really at the heart of what Mastodon is.... Mastodon is just one of many ways to display data in that format.
That is to say.... depending on what your org's tech stack is.... Is it something that can be integrated into how you're already doing things? Is it more intuitive to have an entirely separate tool?
I think the baseline argument for exploring it though is to reduce reliance on 3rd party applications that can change priorities or disappear entirely negatively impacting your org.
Something like a Mastodon implementation, the way I see it, could act as a bit of a stopgap between what's useful *right now* and tools that could be even more useful to build in the future for a news org, and probably a much smaller, much cheaper technical lift while further possibilities are explored.
I think the thing that's hard to wrap the brain around at the moment for a lot of folks is that ActivityPub kinda introduces a different model of info distribution to the table that all of us are still trying to figure out what it might be useful for, and I'd expect to find confusion and resistance in a board room at the moment....
Hope that made some sense. 😂
@nikkiana Hi!
lol it took me all the way to taking a personal day to respond to this in a substantive way.
So: I love the idea of the NPR network supporting ActivityPub. Technologically, it's possible, of course, but how/when/whether something gets implemented is often about much more than whether something is technologically possible.
The good news is that this is also structurally possible. Most NPR stations use the same CMS. Until recently, this was a custom version of Drupal...1/x
@nikkiana Having each of these CMS instances support ActivityPub would be a major advance in a number of ways, but in my opinion, this is the big one: it would allow very easy sharing of articles BETWEEN NPR affiliates.
Right now, most NPR affiliates' websites get an automated feed of NPR articles via NPR's API.
But it's still hub-and-spoke; here in Boston I have automatic access to NPR articles but not, say, to the work of an affiliate in San Antonio. 3/x
@gbhnews
They don't even mention "USA" as their home country in their profile, assuming all people in the world to know that's where their town is. Clearly, they do not have the international fediverse readership in mind. If you belong to the latter, this will probably be irrelevant for you.
Or worse. It never feels nice if one's mere existence is already ignored. Happens a lot on fediverse.
@feditips
@gbhnews I'm a WGBH subscriber and can honestly say I effectively never saw WGBH tweets over on the birdsite.
As far as what I'm looking for here, local is nice but I'd rather have "WGBH news and events" than just "local news". I can get local from several sources.
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