Mastodawn

Ben Werdmuller Jul 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.

Matt DeSiena Jul 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.

Ben Werdmuller Jul 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).

Charles Roper Jul 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.

@charlesroper @ben I actually see the challenge in a bit more (admittedly cynical) way. Not to paint a broad brush, but journalism in 2023 is deeply and destructively lazy. (See: Any and all pubs who covered Amazon Prime Day as a news story.)

One of the best ways to boost reach for journalists is - and this is basic - making embedding Toots in WordPress dead simple.

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@charlesroper @ben Then quoting a source directly and rewarming whatever the source said (This is what passed for "#journalism" in the #Twitter era) would be as simple as it was before.

That's the biggest mystery to me. Why not work with the #WordPress core team to embed toots right now?

Reach would explode.

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@charlesroper @ben Developing reach and sourcing content are the most expensive parts of #journalism.

The second one seems to be such an easy solve for #mastodon . That's a miss.

Charles Roper Jul 13, 2023

@theinstantwin @ben This was announced a couple of days ago:

https://jetpack.com/blog/automatically-share-content-to-instagram-mastodon-with-jetpack-social/

So they're actively working on it. This looks like a way to make it easier to publish stuff. But it's progress.

Automatically share content to Instagram & Mastodon with Jetpack Social

Dedicating time to publish content on all your social media platforms can be tedious and time-consuming. That’s why Jetpack has been working hard to create robust tools to help you automatically sh…

Jetpack

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@charlesroper @ben but can you embed? That’s the killer feature for journalists. Love that this is going on.

Otto Jul 13, 2023

@theinstantwin @charlesroper @ben You can in fact. in the block editor, create an embed block, and paste your URL to the post on mastodon in, and it will embed it.

While WordPress has various blocks for embedding from social networks and such, the general embed block uses oEmbed, and it can embed anything that supports the oEmbed protocol. Of which, mastodon is one.

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@otto42 @charlesroper @ben Wild. Let me try it now. It would be doubly nuts if that was seamlessly integrated and news media wasn't using that, but using Twitter instead.

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@otto42 @charlesroper @ben Not sure if it's my theme, a plugin, etc... but this is what happens

With Twitter, Spotify, etc. -- the embed looks beautiful and works well out of the box and is theme agnostic.

Otto Jul 13, 2023

@theinstantwin @charlesroper @ben Yeah, unfortunately, that's a mastodon problem. Basically, it's falling afoul of the same origin problem. And the mastodon server needs to return a Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header for embedded resources to allow other sites to properly embed stuff like CSS, JS, etc..

If you look in the browser console, you'll find a whole slew of different things it's trying to load, but can't because CORS/Same-Origin policy.

Matt DeSiena Jul 13, 2023

@otto42 @charlesroper @ben Is it something they could fix across all instances or is it my instance (and perhaps others) specifically?

Otto Jul 13, 2023

@theinstantwin @charlesroper @ben Unfortunately, I know very little about the server software and how it is configured for Mastodon. It may be possible to fix across all instances by adjusting the software, or depending on the methods used, it may be much harder than that. Whoever makes the server software would know better than I.

Ben Werdmuller Jul 13, 2023

@theinstantwin @charlesroper I think this really depends on the newsroom. I tend to work with non-profit investigative newsrooms rather than clickbait pubs that depend on ad views. But I take your point.