Convener: Ben Werdmuller (@ben@werd.social), Freddie Johnson (@freddiej@newsmast.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor@mastodon.social)
• Sean Tilley (@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org)
• Kirsten Lambertsen (@mizkirsten@mastodon.social)
• https://bumblefudge.com
• Mike Weston (@mweston@mindly.social)
• Bob Wyman (@bobwyman@mastodon.social)
• Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social)
• Cassandra (@cassandravert@indieweb.social)
• Seth Goldstein (@pch@s3th.me)
• Ben Pate (@benpate@mastodon.social)

Notes (merged from two sets)

• How can the Fediverse welcome the news?
• Newsmast: building spaces for better conversations online.
• Freddie intro: Patchwork demo tomorrow, DM me for beta access, overview of Newsmast history and status update.
• Ben intro: coming from open-source platform building.
  • Has been advocating within ProPublica for the Fediverse.
  • Doing guerrilla Mastadon fundraiser. In the most recent donations to ProPublica from Mastodon outperformed all other social media platforms COMBINED.
  • In news, social media is generally owned by the audience team, not the tech team.
  • Smaller/more engaged is in some conflict with big impact/viral content that is the current standard.
  • Challenge: we can’t prove that we are effective: referral
  • Want a way to show subscribers coming from Fedi. That’s how the rest of the industry thinks.
  • You can’t recommend leaving Twitter and keep your job today, it drops referrals too much in a time of dropping referrals.
  • “We need tracking without advertising”.
  • UTM tags stripped by Mastodon (whackamole dev); link shorteners also hostile.
  • ProPublica uses SocialFlow.
• Feedback: “There is no way the tech platforms as letting this (“fediverse”) happen”.
• Apple.News is an issue. LOL Of course!
• s3th: get journalists off the X platform please.
  • Cross posters: mixpost, fedica, hootsuite, SocialFlow (what ProPublica uses)…

• Sean: WeDistribute
  • Born of the fediverse first. Not outside then in!
  • Dogfooding to a whole new level, our place of business is our social network host is our comments section.
  • We’re using the WP plugin and making our site an AP host.
  • Slowly moving into the non-profit status—how do we crowdfund on the fediverse?
  • For newsrooms coming into the fediverse, start with baby steps.
  • The BBC built their own instance.
  • Training, getting people used to the workflow.
  • A beginning primer to get your professional brand established on Fedi.
  • Interested in a sort of “universal comments section”.

• Ben had an experience where outside commenters on IndieWeb were really angry about having their comments pulled into another site.
• Ben: tools to help journalists find stories would be a big draw.
• Ben: Engagement teams read the comments section closely focusing future efforts and sniffing for leads.
• Sean: Full-text search and maintained lists help us a lot in tracking/lead-finding.
• Johannes: Two buckets of topics here:
  • features (once journos are using the Fediverse)
  • versus getting journos in/on here (cultural/hearts and minds).
• Ben: Dragging the NYT onto Fedi is a… longer-term goal.
• Kirsten: In the product innovation world, we say you have to do at least 3 things 15% better in order to get users to switch. So one way to look at this is what are the 3 things that the fediverse can do 15% better?
• Freddie: Could be a better/safer/brand-safer place to anchor a web presence?
• Freddie: Better control over reader relationships.
• Ben: Greater control and ownership of relationships with subscribers are huge. And a HUGE internal discussion! It’s just that the fediverse is not seen as an obvious solution yet.
• Alternate tracking or alternate subscription tech or alternate attention metrics aren’t that hard to launch as a protocol extension… gets more realistic to raise VC for that kind of work over time.
• Ben: Patreon works in the meantime? How do we evolve those kind of voluntary/manual processes into platforms on top of Fediverse?
• Johannes: What is the the adoption model we’re going for? What’s our definition of success?
• It sounds like there are at least four distinct scenarios:
  • Small niche local newsrooms.
  • Larger traditional organizations (bbc.soial, WGBH, ARD, non-profits likeProPublica)
  • Fedi-first (or maybe social-media-first) orgs like WeDistribute.
• Ben: Fedi’s metrics/DoS are ours - the bigger this gets, better.
• Ben: Payments are huge for tiny publications, pubs like us don’t even need to worry about that, we measure eyeballs/impact otherwise (in readership, etc) to keep donations coming.
• [chat]: bf: newsrooms will continue to exist, but they might look more like coops and activism than for-profit businesses
• Kirsten: journalists and publications being onboarded should be selling journos and publications tools and services that solve their problems to get them here.
• Ben: Our funding is <cough cough>, so becoming-a-social-forum sounds like a lot of work and hiring and org change; VIP-hosted service would be great, like “WordPress VIP”.
• Kristen: I worked at WordPress VIP for 2 years: it’s fully hosted but also fully MANAGED, hand-hold through upgrades, immediate support replies, extra help at elections, etc. Has a premium level where “we’re your IT team” – beyond hosting.
• Bob: Why would a news business want to co-run a platform? Is it an isomorphism to think every publisher needs to OWN ITS OWN distribution platform? It used to be that the capital-intensive distribution created gatekeeping capital forms, but now anyone can be a journo/writer/musician…
• Ben Pate: Censorship, tho– arbitrary moderation and algo –> unreliable distribution; owning the stack becomes more urgent now that reach is owned by oligopolies.
• bumblefudge: blatant self-promo: https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-for-publishers is a great 1pager to send to journalists of all kinds who just need a crib sheet to get read in (or https://learningproof.xyz/newsrooms-and-activitypub/ for people who would benefit from the long-form version)