What's coming next for @Mastodon? Collections. @mellifluousbox joined @mike on #DotSocial to discuss what they are, and what was top of mind in developing the feature. "[This] is really just a group of accounts of profiles that I can follow across servers, ideally across the fediverse, and maybe even someday including the whole open social web," he says. "What was very important for us is to to have safety in mind in how we design it, so what we have consciously decided against is a follow all button, because collections or starter packs, they can also quite easily be weaponized." Get the full podcast episode here.
When TikTok’s future felt uncertain, Tori White saw an opportunity. On the latest Dot Social, @mike sits down with Skylight Social's CEO to talk about building a creator-first video platform on the AT Protocol. Watch the episode here, or find it wherever you get your podcasts.
We’re kicking off season 3 of Dot Social with a conversation between our CEO, @mike, and @rileytestut and @shanegillio of @altstore. Watch the episode here, or listen wherever you get your podcasts:
"We’re doing everything we can to support publishers that produce real journalism — original, fact-based and quality reporting — just as we have for the past 15 years," wrote our managing editor @csullivan in his latest blogpost. Learn more about our work to support indie and worker-owned outlets here:
U.S. Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared on a panel together at the 62nd Munich Security Conference along with Matthew Whittaker, United States ambassador to NATO. They talked about complicated issues of foreign policy and geo-diplomacy for an hour or so and it was, at the time, seen as an uncontroversial, non-newsworthy conversation. Yet a few days later, the press was full of stories about their slip-ups and lack of knowledge. Emily Horne, a former National Security Council and State Department spokesperson, did a deep dive into what had happened. What she found? Stories from "pink slime" sites — local news publications that are largely funded by right-wing dark money groups — picked up and "laundered" into real news by POLITICO, The New York Times and more.
Mastodon has announced plans to make its app more approachable for newcomers, and developed new features for creators. Here's @Sarahp's story for @Techcrunch. Find the full blogpost by @renchap and @imanijoy at the second link.
@tchambers@Objective_Impermanence Hello! Yes, we are a couple of years into our journey to federate Flipboard. Our CEO, @mike, has a podcast where he's interviewed builders, experts and experts across the social web, including @tchambers, @john, @pluralistic and @molly0xfff. We are also working on a new open social product, @surf, which is currently in beta. It allows you to build topical feeds from social profiles (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads), RSS, YouTube, podcasts and Flipboard Magazines, thanks to the magic of federation!
The Roosevelt Institute has released its report on the U.S. media crisis. Its key conclusion: "The crisis facing American journalism is the predictable outcome of decades of corporate libertarian media policy that prioritized commercial logics over democracy." Here's the full analysis.
Today, for Trans Day of Remembrance, @LGBTQNation has put together this Flipboard Storyboard. "Now more than ever, commemorating the Trans Day of Remembrance is a revolutionary act of solidarity that gives our community a memorial to honor our fallen, reflect on what we’ve endured, and advocate for a better future together," writes Daniel Villarreal.
"The 'Why I’m Leaving Substack' post is the new 'Goodbye to All That,'” writes Sarah Scrier for NiemanLab. Some top newsletter writers — including Anne Helen Petersen, Lyz Lenz, and Virginia Sole-Smith — have left Substack for Patreon. Email delivery issues, poor technical support and an overemphasis on social features were reasons for their departure. Both Petersen and Lenz also referenced Substack's platforming of Nazis and hate speech in their farewell notes. Here's more.
Missed @ben's keynote at this year's @fediforum? Here's the full transcript. "The opportunity right now isn't to build a better Twitter or to provide a nice place for people who care about Linux to chat: it's to build infrastructure that vulnerable people can actually use to organize, to communicate safely, and to build community. But we can only do that if we're building with those communities from day one, not building for them based on our assumptions about what they need."
After 29 years of being associated with NBC News, MSNBC is becoming independent, starting with breaking its relationships with correspondents and crews, and ending with a name change to MS NOW. Poynter Institute reports on the official 10 principles of reporting that were circulated to newsrooms staff today, and interviews Brian Carovillano, senior vice president of standards and editorial partnerships, about the way forward.
FediForum is coming up. It's an unconference, so the agenda is set by the attendees, but we do know that it will be unmissable, featuring a keynote from @ben and sessions from people like @quillmatiq, @j12t and more. Here's the schedule, plus some of what's on the cards.
Columnist Philip Bump left the Washington Post last month after accepting a buyout. For his Pbump blog, he writes about power — who has it and is using it responsibly and how to preserve your own — and why he is not a fan of Twitter/X or Substack. "There’s value to debate and conversation, of course, but that isn’t what’s fostered on Twitter or (in my limited experience) on Substack. Instead, conversation occasionally glimmers through a waterfall of bad-faith, uninformed trolls and attacks. It’s an effort to play a college football game after the crowd has stormed the field."
@molly0xfff is one of the most interesting tech critics out there, covering subjects like crypto industry spending in politics, Web3, and the tech industry as a whole with integrity and (sometimes) optimism. She spoke to NiemanLab about her Follow the Crypto site, her love of RSS, migrating from Substack to @ghost, and more. At the second and third links find her DotSocial conversation with @mike and an extract from her Fediverse House presentation at last year's SXSW.
We're proud to support A New Social, a non-profit helmed by @quillmatiq and @snarfed.org. Learn more here about its mission to liberate people's networks from their platforms, and level the playing field across the open social web.
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