Jerry 🦙💝🦙May 27, 2023
Lots of consternation today about newsmax joining newsie.social, with calls for news orgs to create their own fedi-instance rather that joining one like newsie (or journa). That might make sense for some news organizations, but I can imagine it would be challenging for some. The main issue I see is that journalists likely want to maintain a social media presence that doesn’t go away if they move to a new org, so I have to imagine instances like journa and newsie are attractive to individuals.
Not defending newsie having newsmax, but I think it’s unreasonable to say that sites like newsie that cater to journalists shouldn’t exist.
Ron K Jeffries May 28, 2023
Show threadRichard Watt
@jerry Do you have any thoughts on the pros/cons of news/media companies running their own instance. I've worked for a number and Twitter has never been the 'engagement spinner' that other social media platforms are, but on the other hand a lot of journalists and editors like(d) the brevity of it and used it a lot. I'm kind of betting my current employers SRE and community moderation teams aren't up for another potential cesspit, but you never know!
May 28, 2023 at 4:40pmWeb
Show threadJerry 🦙💝🦙May 28, 2023
@richardwatt unless we see a lot of growth, I don’t think the investment is going to be worth it. We have just over a million active users on the fediverse, which seems like a lot, but it’s 300x smaller than twitter and 2000x smaller than Meta.
Show threadRichard WattMay 28, 2023

@jerry then again there's the benefit of the right kind of engagement - I've seen brands engaging with tiktok or insta with amazing results because the tone and demographic is just perfect. OK maybe the tone for Mastodon is 'early adopter nerds and assorted other strange folk' but that could still comprise a really worthwhile market for media outside the mainstream.

As for investment, yeah the price of entry could be high for some - but if you have moderators, people who already run their own instances, good globally attractive niche content and well known writers ready to go, it suddenly seems a bit less of an ask.