👋 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.
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
Moderation also includes deciding whether to block users from the rest of the Fediverse (e.g. if their posts cross the line into harassment), and deciding whether to defederate from other instances (with new ones springing up all the time). I'd expect those two parts to be a bigger proportion of the job than the part which relates to behaviour _from_ the users on your instance.
@unchartedworlds @AlisonW @gbhnews
There are also combinations in which, say, each station runs its own instance and manages its own reporters/staff (the only ones who'd have accounts there)
while NPR proper could manage the shared blacklist of obvious-Nazi-bar sites (since (1) that should really only need to be done once and (2) anyone wanting to sue for being defederated would have to hit the national org (that already has the big-ass legal staff)
Yeah there'd have to a review/appeal process with some borderline sites being looked at multiple times, and maybe the national folks should leave all of the non-obvious cases up to the locals (or give them an intermediate rating and call it a day).
But that's still a win over every last affiliate having to review every last racist dipshit individually
And yes it would be nice to outsource this functionality, since I'm guessing more folks than just NPR would make use of it.
But that would mean coming up with support/funding and a robust governance structure for the outsourced entity so that the nazis can't just buy it out.
@AlisonW @unchartedworlds @gbhnews
To be sure, it *should* be a pretty easy suit to defend against (and ideally you'd only have to defend it *once*), but there are always idiots out there with $$ to file them.
(and there's always the possibility of a whackjob judge or jury getting it wrong)
gbhnews
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Jennifer Moore 😷
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