It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
@Haste this is neither an AD platform nor a platform for one way communication to build an audience which is just consuming.
Hence it's uninteresting for 90% of journalist making a living in corporate media.
Let's keep it that way.
Everybody else who wants real connection and two way conversation is welcome, though.
@rhold I will say I’ve noticed an uptick in… not ads, exactly, but buttoned up branded “content” in the popular feed on .social.
I’m curious how long the “no brands” vibe will last.
Some days it’s like… Proton product announcement followed by Tuta product announcement followed by Open Office product announcement. It’s not overwhelming yet but it rhymes with social media as I’ve experienced it elsewhere. Makes me a little nervous.
@Haste we will see.
I have nothing against artits, local and comminity based or open sources biz tooting their horn here. But aggressive captilastic consumerism produchts probably won't find buisness here. But true: as long as we are niche it's easy to remain pure.
@Haste @rhold those semi commercial FOSS brands (along with some of their devs) have been present on Fedi for years (you can add Nextcloud to the mix as well).
I'm occasionally mildly annoyed by the way some of these brand accounts never seem to reply to anyone and they often go quiet if folk point out bugs/issues in their replies, but they seem to have got better in that respect and at least its software/services that folk on here tend to actually use..
@viktor @Haste @rhold at the very least the marketers could point folk to where these places are, and/or even forward relevant info to the support teams (such as if there's an obvious pattern of issues affecting multiple users).
This of course assumes a product that is aimed at less technical folk, not something like a dev framework / or other specialised tool where everyone using it is likely to know the correct method!
I am already seeing Reddit and Discord (mis)used as support forum for part-FOSS projects (although on some the devs don't seem to read the issues being posted anyway)
@vfrmedia @rhold yeah so I’m actually pretty happy to see FOSS tools here, so I look the other way for things like Open Office. I want them to be successful.
I have however noticed that same tendency with adjacent brands (specifically Firefox) to not engage with the community, especially when the question is critical.
(I do agree that this is not really a convenient place to submit but reports, it would create confusion for engineers, so I’m leaving that alone)
@Haste @rhold in some cases (particularly on Fedi) its not as much full bug reports (as folk know not to do that, or have already checked issue lists), but queries about the project which never get a response (not even a post to a link on the projects official website).
Or the same marketing post is cut and pasted to everywhere (Fedi, Bluesky, Threads etc) without any plans to engage with anyone..
Also as Fedi attracts more non-techie folk (as it is slowly doing), some might at least need some gentle encouragement to point them to where issues lists and forums are for the software they are using.
EVHaste
r-hold
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
Viktor Nagornyy