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Medium Embraces Mastodon
- gen3 4y agoI wonder if this is the start of other companies spinning up their own Mastodon instances. I think it makes a lot of sense for Medium to do so, specifically for communication to the writers that's not attached to a specific post. Archive.org has their own instance @ https://mastodon.archive.org https://mastodon.archive.org
- ceejayoz 4y agoI hope so. News and governmental organizations should consider it, as it pretty effectively solves the "verification" issues.
- gen3 4y agoInteresting idea. You would have a similar problem that you have with email. It's hard to own a fake .gov email, but many people could be tricked by something like mastodongov.com (which is still currently for sale)
- jrm4 4y agoAll relative of course. Eli Lilly.
- ttepasse 4y agoBoth the European Union and the German Federal Government have their own Mastodon servers, for official accounts under to the respective official domains: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore https://social.network.europa.eu/explore https://social.bund.de/explore https://social.bund.de/explore
- riffic 4y agoso does thoughtworks and MIT https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://mastodon.mit.edu https://mastodon.mit.edu
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoAnd the European Union https://social.network.europa.eu/about https://social.network.europa.eu/about
- Vinnl 4y agoMozilla is planning to: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse-instance-social-media-alternative/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launch-fediverse...
- pbronez 4y agoI have a thread going where I note Fediverse activity of Serious Credible Organizations. Medium is a stretch, but I added them because they at least have Serious Funding. https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109552198943104609 https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109552198943104609 Current list is: The Internet Archive Open Street Map Open Source Initiative Mozilla (planned) Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Medium
- Semaphor 4y agoIsn’t the EU at least a bit credible? ;) https://social.network.europa.eu/ https://social.network.europa.eu/
- MR4D 4y agoMastodon/ActivityPub have a great opportunity to become a nice compliment to RSS as a more open internet. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out as more entities take this approach.
- tonystubblebine 4y agoYes. I think what we (Medium) are doing is more along the lines of being a tools/service provider. But my understanding is that all media orgs are thinking about launching their own instance. That would be a form of verified accounts among other things. For example, I believe this in progress instance is the real Hearst: https://hearst.social/directory https://hearst.social/directory
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoIn a sense, it is not different from FB, Twitter et all presence. Part of me is happy about it; part of me fears that even this little nugget of space that was relatively too obscure until now will be absorbed by the mainstream craziness.
- jadbox 4y agoWill all these servers be their own (semi) walled garden or is there a way to public to multiple servers? If so, if someone replies do I see it on other server feeds?
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoMastodon is part of the broader fediverse, which is made up of thousands of servers, each of which has their own set of users. Those servers, and the users on them, can interact with each other thanks to the ActivityPub protocol. In this case, Medium is standing up their own invite-only Mastodon server. Users on that server will be able to interact with users on other servers and vice versa.
- parrellel 4y agoSo long as they're federated, you'll see their replies.
- riffic 4y agoanyone can run their own WordPress, install an ActivityPub protocol plugin, and instantly federate with the wider Mastodon compatible ecosystem. I wish we would stop thinking about this from siloed / walled off perspectives. The real game will start when cms devs put the protocol in as a first class citizen.
- ellieh 4y agoI really hope they're just getting to the "embrace" part, and not planning on reaching "extinguish"
- levesque 4y agoIf they become involved in mastodon it's going to be riddled with banners and impossible to browse without logging in. Can't wait.
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoGiven Mastodon is an open source, federated platform built atop an open protocol, I'm not sure how that'd even be possible. I can understand the tendency towards cynicism, but in this case it's probably misplaced.
- krapp 4y agoAll it takes is for a single well-funded corporate player to offer up a centralized version of "Mastodon" that, oh let's say, just happens to automatically work with all of your Google or Facebook/Meta services, and capture all of the network effects and mindshare. It won't matter what anyone else does with the code or protocol after that, any more than attempts to compete against Google, Twitter or any of the browser makers matter now. The big players will simply take what they want and make it theirs, or else destroy it at their leisure, the way they did with the web, javascript and any number of ostensibly free and open platforms and protocols.
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoEh, I dunno. Back when that particular phrase was coined, everyone was afraid Microsoft was gonna somehow destroy Linux, and yet that never happened, either. Open platforms and protocols are incredibly powerful and resistance to balkanization. Heck, I find it really ironic you mention "the web, javascript and any number of ostensibly free and open platforms and protocols" as examples of things that companies supposedly made theirs or destroyed, given the web itself is more open and standardized than it every was. If anything, Microsoft's failure to push proprietary solutions/extensions into the web (HTML extensions, JScript, ActiveX, Silverlight, etc) is a great example of how resilient the web truly is. Yes, they're used as a substrate for building walled garden services, but how do you interact with those services? Using open protocols implemented by interoperable clients and servers.
- robobro 4y ago> Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less. Worth noting that fediverse itself isn't -- my Pleroma server has a 5000 character limit, other servers I've seen have more. There's no reason why they couldn't have every medium post available in fediverse other than profit motivation... look at writefreely as an example for a blog platform that incorporates fediverse, or, uhhh, Wordpress. Well, it's still better that they're wading in the waters than not wading at all, even if they're not willing to dive in :-)
- jeroenhd 4y agoThere's a good reason why not every medium post is available on the Fediverse: some articles are paid, or Medium wants you to pay for a subscription to continue reading. If Medium publishes everything to the Fediverse, nobody will pay for Medium anymore. Free articles (marked as such by the authors) should still be postable, though. That said, I don't know if the average Mastodon user or app expects blog posts with 10k words and embedded media. I would expect such rich content, but the "using Mastodon as a Twitter alternative" may not. In the end, it's up to Medium to guess what their user base expects from them.
- input_sh 4y agoDisplay the first few lines and click-to-expand. I believe Mastodon already does this in web interface.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoIgnorant question - how usable / viewable / searchable can Mastodon content be to a random browser / google non-logged-in user? Twitter makes it needlessly painful to scroll down these days, but historically while I never got a twitter account I could still check e.g. my public utility outage notices on Twitter if I had to. Facebook is harder or impossible these days to view any content without signing in. Where does mastodon lie?can content creators choose open policies?
- robobro 4y agoExample Mastodon user -- in this case, the project lead: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron It's easy for me to view and scroll his feed despite not having an account on his platform. Also easy for me to find his posts via Google. And (in case it's not obvious in your browser) it's also easy for me to find the automatically generated RSS feed of his posts. YMMV.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kibwen 4y agoMastodon is just open software that anyone can run. By default, this software produces a website with a feed that is public even to users who aren't logged in. Of course, anyone could modify the software to remove this feature on their own instance.
- pmayrgundter 4y agoTim Bray had a good look at this recently https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-Privacy-and-Search https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/12/30/Mastodon-...
- rakoo 4y agoCreators can create public posts just like they can create private posts, followers-only posts, local-only posts. Instances may or may not display content to non-logged users. It's not up to the software, it's up to what the admins and the users want to do. But if it's open, then you most probably even have access to an RSS feed of a user's public posts, so it can even be checked from outside the browser (and the specific app)
- mg 4y agoInteresting. They set up a seperate service for it. I am hoping that companies will do a more "natural" implementation of ActivityPub. By simply making their existing services talk the protocol. Then you could follow Medium authors via ActivitiyPub, comment on their articles and exchange messages with them.
- danuker 4y agoThat sounds like a lot of custom development (with permissions/visibility and all), but it might make for a great experience.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think a lot of companies are afraid to integrate more tightly with Fediverse or build native things on top of Mastadon because so much of the implementation is AGPL. That's one of those licenses that keeps corporate IP lawyers up at night.
- BaseballPhysics 4y agoMastodon may be AGPL. ActivityPub, which is the thing that actually powers the fediverse, is an open standard that anyone can implement on their own.
- riffic 4y agohow about implementing ActivityPub like write.as/WriteFreely?
- cokeandpepsi 4y agoI don't think mastadon will be around that long, it's the most antisocial of the microblogging platforms I see a lot of posts but it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them
- riffic 4y agomasto, not masta
- azangru 4y agoor, rather, -odon (i.e. tooth), not -adon.
- LegitShady 4y agoI don't know anyone who isn't in computers for work who even knows what mastadon is
- robobro 4y agoI'd say the same about RSS! Still love RSS :D
- LegitShady 4y agoRSS during its heyday was much more will known since many sites had RSS badges/icons for you to add them to your reader. Mastodon is nowhere near as popular or well known as RSS and I think will never be.
- kibwen 4y ago> I see a lot of posts but it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them Less than 1% of tweets have replies or conversations. Most of what people have to say just isn't interesting.
- bachmeier 4y ago> it's very rare that there's a reply or conversation in even 1% of them The interaction we used to see on Twitter is largely dead as well. Few people with followings in the thousands will engage with someone outside their small circle. Many block for trivial reasons. It's not what it was a decade ago.
- jrm4 4y agoIt is somewhat ironic that it (for now) has somewhat of an old school free software crunchy hippie feeling feel (which I'm personally always all for), because the value to big companies feels like an absolute no brainer. "Hey, see the stupid thing that happened to Eli Lilly? You know how you can actually just have your own email instead of gmail in your company if you pay for it? Also your own website? This is that, for what Twitter does." Seems positively stupid for companies to NOT go in this direction.
- riffic 4y agothe problem is being able to pitch the wider ecosystem without sounding like a loon spouting technobabble. I'd love to pull off being able to sell this to normies.
- jrm4 4y agoAin't that the truth. I find that I'm the only one leading with essentially what I just said.
- unshavedyak 4y agoI think they (devs) just need to round out the rough corners with blacklisting, whitelisting, etc - because i think: > it's just like email, foo@gmail.com becomes @foo@gmail.com, that's it! Is pretty easy to sell. The issue there is that in any "real" email host (ie not in your closet) you have no problem[1] emailing another host. Yet with Mastodon it's rather dependent on the specific of platforms blocking rules. Which isn't to say that this is an indigestible concept for the average person; just that it's a rough edge, it needs some work, some transparency. Likewise how federation works is also a bit obtuse. The speed of nodes federating to each other feels inconsistent on a UX, and imo you should basically _never_ miss pieces of a conversation. Or at least if you do, it should be very clear that there is a blocked comment, or a yet-to-be-synced comment, etc. Right not it can just look like someone is replying to themselves or etc. Really though it's all quite solvable with some UX it seems. There's some tech issues too of course, but all together this feels quite a feasible "twitter but like email" tool. I'm quite happy with it, and i'm even happier to ignore Twitter. [1]: generally speaking of course. It's expected to just work.
- netfortius 4y agoWhat about starting by making Mastodon a link sharing choice for their articles, among the ones they have by default (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and link-copy)?
- ploum 4y agoThis would requires some dev work. Goal here is just to look cool and visionary in case this "new mastodon thing really takes off in the long term".
- rrix2 4y agoi don't think running an entire web-connected rails app and database for multiple users is less "real dev work" than adding a button to their frontend templates
- ploum 4y agoIt is. Running a container on a virtual instance is a one-man/couple of hours job. Making a change impacting user experience in a product like Medium is a months-long/multiple comitees process.
- jefftk 4y agoThis is a Medium-branded Mastodon instance, not an integration between the Medium blogging platform and the Fediverse. I would love to see an integration where the discussion on a Medium post is viewable both as comments at the bottom of the page and as Fediverse posts. (This is what I was pushing in https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments https://www.jefftk.com/p/mastodon-replies-as-comments)
- tonystubblebine 4y ago(Medium CEO here) Definitely a possibility. Where we ended up landing is that Mastodon is culturally short form. From prior experience just syndicating into a short form ecosystem is kind of lame even if the ActivityPub protocol supports it. So if we have Medium authors on this part of the fediverse then we want to encourage them to be fully there. The medium-length fediverse, i.e. blogs and articles, is still emerging and for us is also a much more complicated product question. But definitely open to it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skybrian 4y agoIt seems like this could be handled by having a short post with a link to the article for each article that authors want to publish that way. This is essentially how blogs are promoted on Twitter and Mastodon already (though people often create longer threads) so it's a "paving the cowpaths" strategy. Since you can do it already, the only difference would be having an official short post representing the article, which would be a focal point for discussion about the article. For better or worse. Maybe having a focal point for article discussion is bad?
- thejohnconway 4y agoI get that. It would be good if you could associate Medium articles to a federated post so that comments on Medium could come from federated servers.
- riffic 4y ago
- AndyMcConachie 4y agoI love the fediverse and I run a Mastodon instance for myself and friends. But we really need some software diversity here. I used to run a Pleroma instance, but stopped when it looked like it wasn't really being maintained anymore. And Mastodon is a pig. As software I have to say I am not that impressed with it at all. I appreciate it for what it is, but it is not quality code.
- ecliptik 4y agoI moved off Pleroma to GotoSocial and it's been a good experience. Much more lightweight code and resource wise; a single Go binary using sqlite (postgres is an option). It's still rough around the edges, but is actively developed and has an engaged and welcoming community. https://gotosocial.org/ https://gotosocial.org/
- debacle 4y agoIt's interesting that Elon laid out that Medium is one of Twitter's first targets, and now Medium is making this shift.
- darknavi 4y agoI am out of the loop. "Target"? Like to compete with? Purchase? Destroy?
- debacle 4y agoOne of the features that Twitter plans to add is long-form blogging.
- input_sh 4y agoSomewhere in the next month or two Twitter is supposed to introduce "tweets" with 4000 character limit, so competing. I don't think he ever intended to purchase Medium, but he did tweet about purchasing Substack at some point. But then again it's Elon, he tweets a lot of things he never seriously intends on doing and he just killed Revue (more or less Medium/Substack competitor).
- tonystubblebine 4y ago99% of writing on medium is longer than 4000 characters.
- tofuahdude 4y agoI'm pretty surprised by this and certainly don't trust Medium's intentions. Medium's entire model has been centralizing blogs and writing to accrue profits in a centralized c corp.