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.
@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.
@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).
@ben @theinstantwin Precisely.
Ideally, the way Mastodon is designed, a newsroom “onboards” their journalists by hosting a node and setting up their journalists on it.
… I’m building a node now and, lemme tell ya, this is not something I expect just any random newsroom to have the in-house competency to do. It’s getting better, but I think it’s easy for tech folk in particular to underestimate how much “just one sysadmin” costs, or how overworked they are the minute they sign up to the average not-tech-focused firm. So with no additional information, I would assume that “Meta sets it up, all you have to do is have your team sign up for it” is a huge value-add for newsrooms and journalists by itself.
This problem will continue until we stop building tools for regular folks to use that are monuments to all our sins (seriously… four package managers? And curl-to-bash? And pulling github repos? Or you could “just use Docker” which is a whole other can of worms? And that’s just setup; God knows I’m about to throw myself to the lions when I turn this thing on and have to self-admin it).
@mtomczak @ben I don't disagree about the node, especially since the entire point of federation from the news side would be going vertical and owning your instance/distribution.
I think they aren't estimating the true cost of the project though. Investing in a hidden algorithm you don't own and then praying it doesn't change is demonstrably not working.
I suspect it's more $ long term to over-invest in someone else's distribution/platform then pay a sysadmin.