If you want to follow news, particularly Canadian news, on the fediverse, there is a great deal here. Looks like this is mainly due to publishers adopting Flipboard.
@rwg I haven't used Flipboard in quite some time. May have to give it another look.
@toran you don't have to, necessarily... you can just follow a bunch of @ACCOUNT@flipboard.com accounts here. I haven't gone to their site this whole time -- I get links directly back to the news publishers' sites.
@rwg@aoir.social Flipboard really has made a huge impact here in terms of news availability. @mike@flipboard.social and his team have taken by far the most strategic approach to the fediverse of any large social media company (no disrespect to Ghost, but they're not large yet).
Of course they're still a big tech company with all that implies, as I've said elsewhere I think it's a coherent position to be opposed to or concerned about the influence of Flipboard / Bluesky / Wordpress / etc . Still it's kind of weird that Meta's much more self-serving approach that (at least so far) has brought a lot less benefit to the fediverse has gotten so much more attention than Flipboard, who really is doing things right.
I agree. Meta's approach, in my view, was to appease European regulators and little else, and yet gets a lot of attention. Flipboard has done a lot of work promoting the fediverse to news orgs and providing a way for news orgs to participate. I definitely find the latter to be more beneficial.
(Although I would still argue news orgs ought to run their own servers.)
@jlines @jdp23 @mike I hear what you're saying, but at least from my view here on a Mastodon instance, I don't see the flatness with Flipboard. I see the logo of the news org, story previews, and pictures from the news org's site. The only way to know it's coming from Flipboard is because of the instance name.
But I don't go to Flipboard.com itself to look at things -- I get news here on Mastodon from orgs that use Flipboard's instance. (If anything, then, my use of Mastodon flattens things...)
@rwg @jlines @jdp23 I really appreciate these thoughts. it’s super motivating to hear people are getting value from the work we’ve done with publishers.
Re: publishers owning their own instance in the fediverse, I think that’s the ideal situation and I think we could see that happening a lot next year.
You've probably already thought of this but if publishers have a way to bring the fediverse audience they've built up on flipboard to their new instances, that could really help with the cold start problem.
@mike@flipboard.social @rwg@aoir.social @jlines@pleroma.debian.social
@mike @rwg @jdp23 I see Flipboard and similar as being able to add value as content aggregators, similar to the way the BBC has ‘The Papers‘ articles on its website. Flipboard, by working with publishers, hence filtering out unreliable sources, could give access to a spectrum of views on, say Electric cars.
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@jlines @rwg @jdp23 yes the tyranny of the For You feed as @juliaangwin.com puts it.