Sonya Mann ✅Both articles about Mastodon (Sarah's on Vice and Casey's on The Verge) are missing a ton of context about the Fediverse that came first, and the community schisms. From Casey's piece it would be easy to think that Mastodon was invented from whole cloth; it wasn't.
To be clear, there are good parts of both articles (especially Sarah's). They're just both incomplete. We need a full-length magazine feature to explain all of this, tbh.
HedgeMage@sonya I have a LinuxJournal column...not sure it's a good fit, but worst case I could pitch it to my editor as an article outside the column... I'm not sure how much time I have to put it together, though, I'd need help on background or someone to interview.
@HedgeMage for once I wish social media was part of my beat >.<
I bet you could interview @maiyannah though! she's not unbiased (no offense Maiyannah) but she knows a lot about this
@sonya @maiyannah I'm not too worried about bias as I always work with 2+ sources unless the specific person and their work is the subject, or I'm getting a deep-dive into a particular project and the project has offered up a representative. For broader communities I always go multiple sources.
@sonya @maiyannah In any case, if there's interest, I'll write it and pitch it, I just won't have time to do the background so I need help either putting the background info together or finding the right 2-3 people to interview. Help me with that and we're on!
MrMetlHed@sonya : But does it matter once the new users vastly outnumber the old users (assuming that happens?) I feel like then the history is dead and everything is remade anew. I bet today there are hundreds or thousands of new users based on those articles alone. Perhaps surpassing the existing user base already.
Social networks can evolve into being unrecognizable quickly
@MrMetlHed c'est la vie I suppose, there's no way to stop this cycle
JJ 🔇「cιtιƶεnƒιvε」🏴Ⓐ@sonya no need to mince words, Casey's is hilariously embarrassing next to Sarah's, she only got one thing wrong (and only if we're being strict). There's no Masto "protocol". But it is sorta it's own standard rn so also it is a bit
@five yeah, I think Sarah's was about 1000x better than Casey's, and I'm not pleased with his shruggy reaction to a basic fact-check either: https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/849349371271491586
@sonya there's journalists, and then "journalists" lol
aust@five I think Casey is extremely funny and I usually like his work, but........ Gellmann's amnesia I guess
@sonya he probably is! he was assigned this as a special interest fluff piece, and treated it as such. Bc Nazis and whatnot rankle Sarah she made it a bigger deal at Motherboard
@sonya this is fucking hilarious tho, poor Sarah lmao -- Casey scooped her (as a journo you want to see your impact, right, so he made it hard to tell who drove traffic) but not only that Eugen shut off signups (thank god) AND hahahahaha...
Did you guess that the *band* Mastodon was on Jimmy Kimmel pushing a new album, rendering all analytics and Google Trends and whatnot completely useless noise for her (and Casey's) purposes. Because that's what happened. https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+jimmy+kimmel @sonya
Meredith L. Patterson
Paul Phillips
Naomi Wu@SexyCyborg most people never get this @sonya
@five @SexyCyborg in particular on Twitter follower count is worthless for anything but optics because of all the spam accounts
kslstn@sonya I'd rather have some good onboarding for new users. The community is awesome so far, but Federated/instance are basically people like me asking how things work
@kslstn it would be nice to have better onboarding, but that won't come from news articles =/
@sonya actually what we need is basic income for the whole world and free healthcare
@kslstn I can get behind that
Kat Lo ✅hey omg I'm a social media researcher o/ i would love to chat with you all about this (for, well, research, more rigorous representation in publications, and extreme personal curiosity)
I also write guides and onboarding materials for tools and platforms, I can help translate community norms and operationalize into expectations/rules if they're interested. \o/
@lolkat @maiyannah @kslstn feel free to hit me up with questions — my personal email is [email protected]. Bear in mind that I'm fairly new here, I just pay attention