As an organization, NPR will no longer use Twitter. This was announced in an internal memo this morning, and comes after Twitter insisted on putting an untrue statement on NPR’s profile.
@timkmak Awesome, but I'm not hearing that NPR is going to migrate to other social media, such as one which comes to mind which is open-source and not controlled by one entity?
Twitter's only value is the companies and people who choose to post there. If they took a stand, and either stopped posting there, or even hedged their bets by participating in both Twitter and Mastodon, then competition would flourish and Twitter would either have to reform, or fade away.
@CarlG314 @timkmak as I mentioned it has been much discussed why news orgs are not present on Mastodon. there were several journalists who used to post here who explained their issues with Mastodon. I don't remember them all now but as I recall there were things like verification, discoverability and QTs. that was individual journalists, not their corporate bosses but its still instructive to know what they want and what Mastodon lacks.
@Mayor_of_Smartarse @CarlG314 @timkmak yes, that's my sense too.
@Homebrewandhacking @herid @CarlG314 @timkmak True, and the app has a search function that includes News, however, unless you are actively looking for it, it won't appear in your feed unless you are following that organization's account. They'd need a campaign to raise their profile.
I imagine that having their own server with a bunch of journalists on it and using a # would be the cheapest ad campaign possible.
But perhaps I'm over-estimating their appeal?
I'm sure a competitor will be along to show us whether that works or not. In the meantime, congratulations to #TexasObserver.
@herid @CarlG314 @timkmak
I'm content just doing my website PHP and JQuery in my retirement. That said, IMHO, SIMPLE PROGRAMMING COULD SOLVE THE MASTODON ADOPTION PROBLEM: The mechanism to like/reply to off-instance posts needs to be automated and seamless, not that I need to copy a link, then paste it in my home instance, retrieve the post, and only then can I respond.
(Corollary, if you had to do that for every response, would you even consider using Mastadon? Of course not, so just fix it.)
@herid @timkmak Good point, and one I realized after I saw the image of their other social media presence. However, you would think they would prefer open source to alternatives controlled by someone who could end up as arbitrary as Musk or create a walled garden.