👋 Hello #fediverse! I'm going into a meeting at 4ET to talk about our newsroom's social media options.

If you think our station and other #NPR stations should have a Mastodon server or a broader presence in the #fediverse, pls boost this post. If you have thoughts, please reply, I want to hear them!

NOTE: as I mentioned to @FediFollows and @[email protected] earlier today, it's important to understand the barriers that face stations or networks that want to set up a server. I summarize those here: https://mastodon.social/@gbhnews/110186548799130656

No one should expect anything to happen instantly.

Not totally sure why my link is not working but here's the commentary I shared before:

I think it's worth understanding what the barriers are to stations or networks establishing their own servers.

As the social editor, if I see a new platform and think, "oh, that's interesting," I have the power to open an account there.

Setting up a server for a station or a network would involve the cooperation of IT, marketing, and legal folks. Big stations and big networks have to do a fair amount of prep and due diligence before they make a move like that. 1/x

So it's not just the cost of setting up/running a server (which people tell me here could be quite minimal). It's the man-hours of prep, setup, and ongoing maintenance for things like moderation, tech support, etc. that come into the equation.

And the other half of that equation is the assessment the people involved make of the opportunity. Math is a big part of that. How many users are on that network, and how many of those people are likely to see or engage? 2/2

@gbhnews In my view, It’s more important to be on the platform and interacting than it is to host your own instance right now. My parallel is email. In the 90s, nobody really cared if your email was an ISP instead of your own domain. Let’s welcome journalists here, however they get here. Like the rest of us, as they get acclimated they might put something on their domain, but it’s more important to get on the platform and become a member of the community than anything else