They can’t admit that there’s something other than for profit ventures which are functional
Comment on Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible
olympicyes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I cannot understand why news organizations and large companies wouldn’t want to run official communication through Mastodon. I understand the network effect but allowing your employees to create a Twitter account is a bit like letting them officially do business with their personal AOL email account. I don’t think Mastodon is even close to perfect but it gives the publisher a huge amount of control.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Be careful what you wish for.
Corporations want to control every aspect of their image and maximize profit. Were they to move to Mastodon there are going to be consequences that could reshape how Mastodon and the Fediverse operate. Maybe there would still be independent instances, but profitability could drive corporate instances that would greatly overshadow private ones and/or even change the way the whole thing works so it’s much more difficult or expensive to be part of the system. That’s what corporations do - control the system, maximize profits by charging to participate in as many aspects of their system as possible, buy up competitors and if that doesn’t work they crush them.
AProfessional@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What are you even talking about?
A companies instance is used for two things. Having employee accounts associated with them officially and for making their own posts.
If they make spam they just get defederated. They have no power.
Jeffool@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I absolutely get you; you’d think companies would want this. However employees probably shouldn’t want this. It’s generally probably better for them that they work for their own brand when possible, so I’m hesitant to suggest this become a thing.
olympicyes@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The business of the newspaper is to publish news. The problem is that XTwitter is not a news publishing platform and their recent changes make it almost impossible to figure out what is real or not. So many posts are made to look like news releases but there is not one bit of parody in them. If someone wants to have their own private account, fine, but their official work ought to not be interfered with by trolls and people with a malicious agenda.
Jeffool@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m not arguing that Twitter is a good platform; I left it back in November for Mastodon and I’ve been happy with the switch. And if publishers want to run accounts labeled as “articles by Person A” and “articles on Topic B”, (to essentially make them user-friends feeds, instead of asking newbies to learn how to add RSS,) I think that’s great!
I’m just saying if a journalist (or any creator really,) is going to be active on social media, that it’s worth to work for the best interest as much as possible. Cultivating their circle on a neutral (between them and their publisher) platform is better for them than working exclusively on a platform owned by their publisher, locking in everything they do socially there. Be that Mastodon, IG, or whatever fits them and their style.
atetulo@lemm.ee 8 months ago
wouldn’t want to run official communication through Mastodon.
It’s a culture thing.
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People cannot think for themselves.
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People are skeptical of open technologies.
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Businesses tend to support passing around money with other businesses. It’s in all of their best interests that people aren’t even exposed to free alternatives.
cricket97@lemmy.world 8 months ago
On Mastodon, instead of trusting a company not to ban you, you have to trust some random terminally online nerd who set up a server not to ban you. It’s not a great solution, just shifts the responsibility.
atetulo@lemm.ee 8 months ago
If you’re really that concerned, you can set up your own instance.
Also, if one instance goes belly-up, it doesn’t take the whole thing down with it.
just shifts the responsibility.
No, it does more than that if you understand what you’re talking about.
cricket97@lemmy.world 8 months ago
i got banned from an instance and lost my entire account until i begged the owner to unban me for a sec to allow me to transfer my profile.
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kumatomic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 months ago
I can’t help but wonder if most other news organizations’ corporate owners wouldn’t want to legitimize the fediverse in anyway. It might loosen their deathgrip on the internet .
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I don’t understand why they can’t jusy write on their website or publish an email newsletter or RSS feed. Why do we need anything like Twitter for organizations?
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
NPR does maintain a number of good RSS feeds ( feeds.npr.org ), which are being simulated onto Mastodon by press.coop. They are doing this for a ton of news organizations: press.coop/directory
Zimeron@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It doesn’t work well though, it posts week old stories quite often and posts a lot of posts all at once.
Zorque@kbin.social 8 months ago
Cause people actually use twitter.
ram@bookwormstory.social 8 months ago
No they don’t.
Zorque@kbin.social 8 months ago
Yuh-huh.
jsh@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
NPR does that, actually. Their newsletters are the only ones in my inbox that I actually read.
Ddhuud@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Because people want to interact with it, leave a comment. It’s not nearly as satisfying to yell at cloud, it is as effective tho.
…And they can capitalize on that interaction.
tdawg@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Because providing a central location for people to communicate about things on via an information exchange system is clearly what people want. The issue is that it isn’t held up and maintained by society at large but by private interests. Stuff like mastadon have a chance at changing this, but we’ll see
TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id 8 months ago
Correction; it’s what some people want. Most people pay very little attention to Twitter, X or Mastodon. These systems are very much about providing a way for media and tech elite to talk to each other.
tdawg@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’m sorry but no. Nearly the entire English speaking world was using twitter at one point. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not what people want
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Fundamentally microblogs are different than all of those things. RSS is too nerdy for regularly people, who are already struggling just with the idea that they have to pick a server on mastodon, and RSS readers are not at all designed for short-form content like it. Email newsletters are roughly the same, and I really don’t want every tweet in the form of an email, that would get real, real annoying. Then you toss in that both are one-way communications. And finally, you have to go seeking all of those things in a significantly different way than when you than just saying “I’ll search twitter for GE, I’ll bet I’ll find them there, and they’re going to likely be more responsive than any other channel because it’s all in public.”
Generally speaking, I really hope that outfits like NPR and the brands and such don’t all just go to Threads and instead choose to really own their identity and self-host on federated services.
jmp242@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
I guess I’ve just never seen any value in microblogs at all, which probably explains my confusion lol. I don’t want a 160 character post from NPR about anything.
I agree with you about self hosting, I just don’t actually see for something like NPR what federated services do for them. They’re already the central source of what they want to publish. They have a website. Why complicate things? While I like an ad-free experience of Lemmy etc - I just don’t get what NPR would get beyond having a comments section (discus?) on their news or opinion stories.
The best I can see is that it’s essentially ads for NPR, but then it both seems to me like … well … buy ads, and kind of a sleazy thing to throw up stuff onto Mastodon in the hopes - what? People learn that NPR exists? Product placement into the fediverse?