Convener: Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor@mastodon.social)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Mike Weston (@mweston@mindly.social)
• Ben Werdmuller (@ben@werd.social)
• Johannes Ernst (@j12t@j12t.social)
• Darius Dunlap (@dariusdunlap@indieweb.social and @darius@micro.blog)
• Mark Corbett Wilson (@mcorbettwilson on Mastodon, X, LinkedIn)
• https://bumblefudge.com
• Jon (@jdp23@blahaj.zone)
• Anca (@anca@allpeep.social)
• Seth Goldstein (@pch@s3th.me)
• Melanie Bartos (@melaniebartos@chaos.social)
• Kirsten Lambertsen (@mizkirsten@mastodon.social)
• Joan Pla (@joanpla@mastodon.social)
• Babette Knauer (@Bibliothecaris@social.edu.nl)
• @BjornW@mastodon.social)
• Cassandra (@cassandra@indieweb.social)
• Bob Wyman (@bobwyman@mastodon.social)

Notes

Dan: personal experience: failed to get journalists he otherwise respects off X, which is now focused on undermining the very thing – democracy – that makes a free press possible. Also failed to get interest from philantropic institutations – not sure why.

Dan: Much smaller user count than on X, but orders of magnitude more engagement on Mastodon.

Bob Wyman: Does government (and other organizations) have an obligation to post on multiple platforms, if the tools are easy to use?

Attempt to get Fediverse into journalism programs are stymied by the fact that it seems like “more work” with “little reward”. competing interests already exists (conversation vs. exposure, etc) and adding a new platform makes it even harder.

Johannes asks: Where are the visionaries in journalism that can help bring the others forward, similar to the visionaries currently elevating Fediverse in other ways?

Contributions in chat:

• Michael Crow is a visionary. President of ASU.
• David Pierce at The Verge has been writing great articles about the Fediverse https://www.theverge.com/authors/david-pierce
• ProPublica
• Robert Sheer
• BBC: Ian Forrester: https://cubicgarden.com/about/
• Glen Ford - founder of Black Agenda Report was a visionary.
• Andrew Losowsky is the guy at Vox who’s been working on a lot of the fediverse - that whole group (and particularly but not exclusively The Verge) is definitely in the visionary category
• Jeff Jarvis
• Sarah Perez at TechCrunch - and she’s active on Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Sarahp
• Danny Schechter the ‘News Dissector’ was a visionary. Hw wrote Weapons of Mass Deception in 2004. At the end of each broadcast, Mr. Schechter borrowed a phrase from Wes Nisker, a San Francisco broadcaster, and exhorted his listeners: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-for-publishers - Good one-pager 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).

Dan: Resistance to change has been the hallmark of journalism for a while.

Melanie Bartos is working on getting academics on fediverse: if you are maybe interested, this is what we do in Innsbruck: https://www.uibk.ac.at/en/newsroom/2024/mastodon-for-all-university-employees/

From the academic communication perspective: Twitter used to be the way for us to reach journalists. We want to have a direct line to journalists, where else can we go to get that? Twitter forces us to pay to reach the audience. We closed our channel there and are just monitoring.

How is ProPublica doing on the Fediverse? We are there, because there’s a single person who is posting. We had great success fundraising on fediverse - we get more than twice as much funding throug Mastodon than other social media. See also Ben’s session: Onboarding the News.

We should have tools that make it easy to publish to both Twitter and the Fediverse.

Ideally, we’d have multi-network tools that are better than Twitter even when one is posting only to Twitter. (i.e. Address organizational needs of logging, authorization, assocation with billing accounts, etc.)

Doing the right thing should be easier than doing the wrong thing.

Once Fedi gets big enough, network effects will draw more people in. Important to create a positive experience–push on a door that is already open.

We (https://publicspaces.net) created a campaign called ’eXit’ to help public organisations to move away from X & EXperiment with Mastodon. It’s in Dutch, but you’ll get the gist https://publicspaces.net/2024/05/27/exit-maand-1-mastodon-server-zoeken-de-juiste-instellingen-en-je-eerste-introductietoot/