Reposting this here from the discussion in !news@lemmy.world:
There’s a real argument for a Mastodon use case for news organizations, governments, and colleges.
If they’re just seeking engagement, then they have to wait for the platform to grow. But this isn’t about that.
Many news organizations already have comment sections on their website, and they want to push out information on breaking news as quickly as possible. They need a platform to do those things. So, a lot of them use Facebook for embedded comments on the page and Xitter to breaking news. The thing is that they could use mastodon for both, and run their own instance, which would give them total control and not be at the mercy of Musk or Zuck.
Colleges use expensive proprietary messaging apps for students, clubs, and teachers that they can monitor and adjust to fit their needs. Mastodon offers that.
Governments sometimes end up in legal hot water due to freedom of information, etc. that comes with corporate social media. Mastodon offers the freedoms and controls necessary to disseminate vital information and to allow or reject posts as required by local laws.
The point is that Mastodon is an effective public facing communication system that also allows internal controls by the host.
The only publicity and marketing budget that the fediverse has is us, so any opportunity to promote it is our job. Government, education, news. These are the vital areas to promote.
There’s no need for mastodon to be in the mix here, whatever software they are using can federate directly. I know wordpress already has a plugin to do exactly that. (I have no idea what CMS major news outlets use, hopefully not wordpress)
What proprietary messaging for colleges? Lol
YikYak, GroupMe, Ready Education, Remind, UniBuddy, Viva, etc. Etc.
Sounds incredibly dystopian to me, sort of like that whole idea of letting universities decide whether crimes on their campus are prosecuted that seems popular in the US for some weird reason.
What a fucking missed opportunity to send their users to subscribe to a replacement account (mastodon, blue sky, threads, or whatever)
They kinda do but only at the very bottom of the page:
I wouldn’t consider any of those an alternative to twitter
Oh gee I don’t know, maybe because it’s a shit platform run by a petulant man child.
Bluesky is the most downloaded social app at the moment. Hope they can handle the influx
“no paywall”?
there never was a paywall on tG, no?
No. The have nag screens for donations, but they don’t block on principle.
disable JavaScript?
phyrric. barn doors and horses spring to mind.
Should have stayed on until musk booted them. Missed opportunity. Also X needs more counter-content, not less.
No quantity of counter-content can overcome the person who controls what posts are actually seen by other users. Staying on X can never lead to any kind of balance. Staying there only serves to prop-up the false sense of legitimacy.
They could spin up a Mastodon instance, but given how lousy their UK editorial department is with TERFs, it would be justifiably blocked for transphobia.
I really wish running your own mastodon was as accepted as running your own email server. There’ll be no “blue check mark” problem if your company runs the server and only provides accounts to employees.
They don’t need to do any of that. Just make an account on any instance and go forth.
If you can leave X, you can change instances if needed in the future, too.
Tbh that would put a lot of strain on someone else’s server. It’s not like they’re a small business that can’t afford a dedicated server, and each journalist could have a dedicated handle
Pretty sure if they joined mastadon.social, they’d be fine. Plus the clout for mastadon would be woth the orgs investment if it was needed, though their infrastructure would likely be fine. We’re not talking millions of viewers.
tbh Bluesky also a nice alternative as well.
You mean Future-X?
BlueSky can be bought and influenced. No thanks.
BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.
Bluesky is at risk to be bought by another Musk in the future
how many twitters can one man sell to an elmo?
We’ll have to wait and see, at least one for now ;)
