Frühere Suchanfragen
Suchoptionen
Now with more and more #instances upgraded to version 4.2.0 of #Mastodon, you can compare full text #search on different ones: Having multiple accounts, I did – and yes, the differences are rather big.
Once again it seems clear, the bigger your instance the better for finding content in the #fediverse. Especially for journalists, this also implies, that an instance by your organization might not be the best idea. Something like journa.host could make more sense.
1) You can make even a single user instance have a wider reach through relays, especially targetted ones that are on the topics you're interested in. (More info at https://fedi.tips/using-relays-to-quickly-expand-a-servers-view-of-the-fediverse/)
2) Your own server's view of the Fediverse doesn't affect the visibility of your accounts to other people. For example my account @FediFollows has 60k followers despite being on a single user server with no relays.
The danger of depending on large instances is you are more at risk of them doing something bad, perhaps accidentally or deliberately.
The surest way to guarantee your control over your account is to own your own server.
News organisations need to think about what their priorities are, and what their accounts are for, before deciding to just sign up somewhere large.
Of course, that's right. I'm spitballing right now: Maybe it would be a good idea for journalists to have an account for "seeing" the fediverse on a big instance, and another one for interacting with it and being "seen" on an instance by their organization (like ours).
Or set up relays to "see" the fediverse but delete the content very rapidly, so to not fill the own server too much. (You don't want stuff from some days ago to reach you, maybe)
Your examples of Ukraine, Armenia etc. are good, but in general, I think it would be nice to have journalists ponder on the meaning of "newsworthy". Too many of the daily articles at least in Finnish newspapers are just people trawling trough the social media and publishing tweets of politicians, researchers and celebrities without any further contextualization.
A while ago a journalist complained Fediverse will not be useful for journalists, because it's hard to keep track of who likes whose toots, you can't use lists to follow toots without also following the person etc. To me, that just sounds... stalkerish.
Yes, Twitter can be useful in following events that are happening, but it seems the media has also become too reliant on it to churn out content without really thinking whether it's worth publishing or not.
@feditips
@ssundell You're right, I don't like this stuff either. Rest assured that I chose the examples not by accident.
@mho @ssundell It works like a clock that around 9:30 every morning a couple of journalists will call and ask me about whatever the British intelligence slide says that day. So yes, definitely some laziness there.
The list thing has been fixed in the latest version of Mastodon, so now you can actually have lists of people you don’t follow.
@mho @feditips A weakness with relays is that large instances don’t post to them (and if they do, they are going to consume your storage space in no time). So the only way for a post on for example mastodon.social to be searchable for me is if someone on my server is actively following that user, or it’s boosted so my server notices it.
@anderspuck
(… or if it's been retreived by url by some user or bot on your server.)
@mho @feditips
Yes, there are relays based on hashtags which are very handy for themed servers:
