It gets more absurd every day for Big Journalism to keep pouring its work into Saudi-government-funded Twitter, which is controlled by a right-winger who hates real journalism and boosts extremists.
It gets even more absurd for journalism orgs to keep embedding tweets in their stories, given Musk's unfathomable destruction of the platform's usefulness.
I keep wondering when journalists will discover that big tech is not their daddy.
Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
Exactly!
Like so often, just follow the money.
@dangillmor The vast majority won't quit it until and unless they decide it's no longer useful for promoting their work and their individual or corporate brands.
Fortunately, thanks to Musk's staggering incompetence (not his evilness) that day may come soon.
@jobsboils @dangillmor My (Pulitzer-nominated) buddy Joshua Ellis is fairly far along putting together a system he named Kowloon which is essentially “an Open Source, Mastodon-compatible social networking system in a box.”
An individual can set it up for a blog similar to WordPress, except it has a bunch of features for what Josh calls “circles” in terms of who sees what posts.
And its Node.js components are useful for things like the CMS-to-social workflows that news orgs need.
@eschaton Those advantages will need to have $ attached to them -- either directly (revenue streams) or indirectly (brand awareness, career advancement, etc,)
Appeals to the public good are not going to cut it.
@eschaton THAT'S the kind of argument that may click with them (so to speak). 😉
Also, the fact that journos have their own instance (and media orgs can create their own) and so won't have to put up with some lunatic billionaire's bullshit.
@voxpopsicle @jobsboils There are indeed some journalism-centric instances; these are great for independent journalists.
The reason for a journalism org to have their own server is editorial/byline control. Say Some Paper is on the web at somepaper.com, you can trust that pretty much anything published via ActivityPub from the somepaper.com domain is legitimately from that organization without third party “verification.”
One of the coolest things about the Fediverse is that both big tech and big journalism can only remain on equal footing as local journalism and tech initiatives. Just because they're "name brand this and that" doesn't propel them to the top.
@dangillmor This is not directed at you, but I realized something.
All the mastodites (my word) who predict or hope for #twitterisdead is like protesting against electricity. The real problem is that twitter became a privately-owned utility owned by a guy who feels he is the utility’s only customer. 😢 People will not leave twitter until he finally turns off the lights.
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