Mastodawn

Scott Jenson 1d ago

Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.

I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!

Ben Hardill 1d ago

@scottjenson @carnage4life Or maybe we all come here to get away from the politics and the AI BS

Scott Jenson 1d ago

@ben But that's the very definition of a mono-culture. A vibrant community allows all of these topics, encourages them even. Then, with filters, who you follow, hashtags, and blocking you get the feed you want.

To get the culture you want by cutting off the supply is counter productive.

Ben Hardill 1d ago

@scottjenson But I get pushed US politics all day by the main stream media & I'm not even in the US & current politics (here & there) is heavily slanted towards manufactured wedge issues.

AI is a similar, for me the moral and environmental arguments against are plenty before we get into the rest, yet as I work in software it's impossible to get away from.

So I come to a place where I can choose not to engage with it, I block/mute very little, I mainly ignore it if it ends up in my feed.

Scott Jenson 1d ago

@ben and I want to support you, you have every right to view what you want. I'm not asking you to see anything you don't want.

I'm just saying that solving this issue by gatekeeping is a slippery slope. We need better filtering tools, not a purity test of who is allowed to post here.

@scottjenson I may have miss understood the initial post, I'm not suggesting the journalists shouldn't post, just that I think their engagement measurement may not be the right metric (but it is the one they are used to)

MattChippytea 1d ago

@scottjenson @ben couldn’t agree more. Dare is an interesting character but he spray posts across platforms and is only able to engage so much, which results in engagement focussed elsewhere. I honestly thought the account here was a bot, which it sort of is.

spiegelmama 1d ago

@ben @scottjenson So, a little context from a former journalist: I asked my boss if I could start and manage a mastodon account for my publication, and she advised that we would have to conduct a study to justify the use of my time - a company asset - by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it and I ended up deleting the account I had already started. It's often not a matter of the journalist's lack of imagination or excess of ego, but their need to meet metrics.

J Miller 22h ago

Thank you for sharing your authentic experience. My snarky side says "Were they that circumspect in the early days of Twitter? I bet not."

But you point to a very valid issue for journalists that I believe also extends to nonprofits. It's not the whole answer, but we who want journalists and nonprofits may need to actively hit the like button a lot more.

stefan (stefbun)22h ago

@JMMaok @spiegelmama tbh it does not seem tooo hard to me to measure "engagement" atleast for the number a link is clicked (which could be used as a measure on how much "traffic" a presence on masto brings you).

You can do analytics like this in a very unintrusive way not even much needed.

A german publication and NGO that fights fake news uses a simple UTM parameter in the links they share here by attaching "utm_source=mstdn" which could give you a hint on where visitors are coming from when they click a link. Should not be to intrusive tbh. And analytics software can track this.

> by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it

So tbh this seems more like a skill issue more than "there is no way to track this stuff". using a simple parameter is not intrusing privacy all that much tbh and may be deamed acceptable.

Obviously a discussion with the community of where the account posts if this is fine.

J Miller 22h ago

@stefan @spiegelmama

Yes, perhaps it is a skill issue. But it's not really a *core* skill for resource-constrained nonprofits, who are mostly absolutely getting overwhelmed by (gestures broadly).

Encouraging that publication/NGO to share what they are doing with their peers would be helpful. In my experience that's how these organizations learn new practices. And well done to them for being here on Mastodon!

stefan (stefbun)21h ago

@JMMaok @spiegelmama It is very much a skill issue. But it is one that people running these sites made for themselves.

I agree that journalist does not need to know that stuff. Their job description is different. They are there to write stuff that people might find interesting. But cost-cutting made them do marketing as well. A vastly different skill tbh.

In a perfect world a publication would have a person doing marketing and knowing their shit as well as a technical person who knows off stuff like this.

Cutting costs does not help with this. as well as giving away control over such things to cloud providers and stuff. Learned helplessness.

The last paragraph is a networking (as in social context). But random fedi commenters should not be the way to do that. But visiting Foss-adj. Events and the more boring stuff like lectures is. Or just asking some other publication you see on fedi on what they do. Maybe you get an answer. I dunno.

(I hope this post does not come off as too brazen... not my intention)

@stefan @spiegelmama @JMMaok

Yeah but fedi also has a disproportionate number of people who are going to use tools that remove tracking parameters from links...

stefan (stefbun)21h ago

@pixx @spiegelmama @JMMaok that is an obvious flaw with unintrusive tracking but so be it. Never said it was the most reliable method anyway.

Though I would argue thats more of a "desktop browser"-problem.

As much more traffic is mobile even on fedi pretty sure this might be less of a problem than it might seem?

But you will surely have to do more work to determine if fedi is "worth it" or not, like looking at other forms of "engagement", like comments, boosts and favs as well.

Like doing actual analytics work.

In the end I don't know too much about the professional side of this anyway

spiegelmama 17h ago

@stefan @JMMaok @pixx The professional side is that Google Analytics, at least when I was working, could not track traffic coming from the fediverse. Thus the numbers people could not count fediverse traffic in a comparable way. I don't think this is a bad thing on the fediverse side at all - just that lots of people here don't understand how (a lot of) journalism outlets function, and occasionally I can provide some background.

At this point, I'm exhausted, though, so if you want to argue with the world, boogie on, but without me. ❤️

@spiegelmama if numbers of other journalistic outlets work for you, you could ask @netzpolitik_feed for theirs, as for them mastodon works quite well 🤷‍♀️

spiegelmama 19h ago

@malte @netzpolitik_feed Sadly it did not.

@spiegelmama @ben @scottjenson

If you have to use 2 units company time to evaluate whether the 1 unit of company time you're using is being well spent, there's already a problem 😂

happyborg 19h ago

@spiegelmama
It's trivial to track referrals from anywhere. You just add a parameter or parameters to the link.

@ben @scottjenson