Ben WerdmullerJul 13, 2023
I struggled for over six months to get the newsroom I worked for onto Mastodon. There were lots of reasons why not. And now they’re on Threads with ~10K followers, the engagement they need, and the tools they need to understand their audience. And their content starts conversations and is reaching people who need to see it. This stuff matters.
Show threadMatt DeSienaJul 13, 2023

@ben I remember this same statement being made in 2014. “We have to get on Facebook.” Then “We have to pivot to video.”

You know the rest. There is no one more of a glutton for punishment than news media. There is no rake they won’t step on.

Show threadBen WerdmullerJul 13, 2023
@theinstantwin I actually think it’s the Mastodon project that stepped on this rake. Everyone was aligned - they just didn’t have the tools they needed to be able to sign on, and the journalists who did sign up had a terrible time onboarding (including choosing instances that turned out to be problematic).
Show threadCharles RoperJul 13, 2023
@ben @theinstantwin The added dimension to this is that those same journalists tell the stories that people listen to. So if they have a hard time with Mastodon and it doesn't meet their needs (quite different needs from most of us - massive engagement being a must), then the narrative forms that Mastodon is not good enough (too technical, low engagement, wrong tone), which makes a vicious cycle. Journalists writing stories about Mastodon is somewhat like a fish telling stories about fresh air.
Show threadCharles RoperJul 13, 2023
@ben @theinstantwin But that's not to say Mastodon doesn't have the problems. It's just those problems are sink or swim for a journalist. It's never going to work if they can't get engagement fast.
Show threadCharles RoperJul 13, 2023
@ben @theinstantwin I'm going through a fresh alt-account start up in a non-tech domain (sport) and what I've found is that signing up is the least of the problems. The biggest problem is finding other people to follow and be followed by. A huge majority it seems sign up, do the intro post, get absolutely ZERO engagement, then are never seen again. It's excruciatingly hard following people on different instances. It's hard, slow work. I think I'll get there in the end, but it takes so much time.
Show threadGabriel PettierJul 13, 2023
@charlesroper @ben @theinstantwin i advise following tags, as a starting point, just search them and click the follow button, it’s a gem feature, but almost impossible to discover if nobody tells you about it, of course, you might need to mute a few accounts abusing tags, but that’s less of a problem than i expected, and it gets you people that are actually talking about your subject in the TL, so you can follow the interesting ones, or just keep the tag search.
Show threadCharles Roper
@tshirtman @ben @theinstantwin Yeah, you can follow hashtags and join groups. But there's a chicken and egg element to this. Unless people actually *use* the hashtags in their posts, and unless people actually join and post to groups, then following these things doesn't help. The hashtags and groups need a critical mass of people using them to become effective, and that seems to be part of the problem, especially for people used to Twitter's algorithm, which surfaces content as if by magic.
Jul 13, 2023 at 1:16pmWeb
Show threadGabriel PettierJul 13, 2023
@charlesroper @ben @theinstantwin yep, it doesn’t exactly replace an algorithm that tries to guess your interests and push them to your feed, some like that total control, some are disappointed by it, there has been a few services proposal to help, but nothing really caught on i think.
A lot of improvements would start with a better search, but there is also some fundamental opposition to that, people don’t want to, well... work.