Scott Jenson1d 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!

Show threadBen Hardill1d ago
@scottjenson @carnage4life Or maybe we all come here to get away from the politics and the AI BS
Show threadScott Jenson1d 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.

Show threadBen Hardill1d 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.

Show threadScott Jenson1d 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.

Show threadBen Hardill1d ago
@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)
Show threadspiegelmama1d 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.
Show threadJ Miller1d ago

@spiegelmama

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.

Show threadstefan (stefbun)23h 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.
Show threadpixx22h ago

@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...

Show threadstefan (stefbun)22h 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 
Show threadspiegelmama

@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. ❤️

Apr 6 at 6:45pmWeb