Giornalismo anti-Big Tech. L’esperienza di @saskia di @newsmast al Festival Internazionale del Giornalismo, 2025
La comunicazione e l’advocacy sul social web aperto stanno fallendo. Tutti cercano di dire qualcosa, ma in realtà nessuno dice nulla.
Il linguaggio tecnico non funziona. Questo include il “Fediverso”. Le campagne isolate su reti decentralizzate non funzionano. Affermando la “purezza” della piattaforma, nessuno impara a conoscere questi spazi. “Costruisci e arriveranno” non è vero. Gli esseri umani sono cose complesse e hanno bisogno di più di quattro mura per sentirsi a casa.
#Bluesky will collapse just like #Twitter did.
They are structurally toxic because of their business models.
@macfranc@friends.polli.social @giornalismo@feddit.it @newsmast@newsmast.social @saskia@newsmast.social
@notizie bluesky doesn’t force you to pick a server. Picking a server is like pledging allegiance. It’s a lot of responsibility. For jornos in particular often important to uphold an aura of impartiality.
@teirdes I’m sorry but this is a totally fallacious reasoning that can be forgiven to an uninformed user, but it is not acceptable on the part of a journalist.
First of all, there are many instances dedicated to journalism, but each of them has particularities: instances based on the verification of the journalist, others pertaining to a particular linguistic area, others still linked to a specific political area. For example, we created an Italian Mastodon instance for journalists and academics and we accompanied it with a special version of Mastodon that allows you to create long and formatted texts. Well, it was of no use: academics are ten times more than journalists!.
Beyond these instances, there are others of a generalist nature, multilingual or localized in the national language.
Finally, there is always the possibility of creating your own instance: a personal instance of the individual journalist or an instance of the organization to which it belongs (publisher, newspaper, cooperative, collective). Without excluding the possibility of federating your Wordpress blog (a very simple action: all you need is a free plugin) or creating a newsletter on Ghost.
As you can see, no journalist would be forced to embrace an instance.
The problem is mainly attributable to journalists:
- their laziness
- their ignorance of the Fediverse (which was initially sold as an alternative to Twitter, but IT HAS NEVER BEEN AND CANNOT BECOME SO
- the subjection that journalists suffer from fashions (Bluesky and Threads)
On our part, on the part of us activists of the Fediverse, there is obviously some blame, including that of having presented the Fediverse as something difficult to explain and not as something easy to use.
@notizie have you tried simply sending journalists spam email to market your journalism oriented servers? Or for instance awareness raising through their labour unions or clubs?
@teirdes I had the presumption to identify some journalists who I thought were more sensitive to the issue of decentralization and the independence of their digital presence. I limited myself to those. Many of them didn’t even answer me, while others told me that they would have preferred to register in an international instance, demonstrating that they had understood absolutely nothing about decentralization. And in fact their profiles have stopped being active for a couple of years now… 😅
Now for a while I’ve been dealing more with the consolidation of the instance rather than with new entries, but I will surely soon start doing a bit of a broad-spectrum campaign again, as you suggested and as I should have done from the beginning
@notizie tell me if you need help :)
@teirdes Thank you, even if it would take a specific commitment in each Nation, explaining well, based on the characteristics of the national publishing industry, What could be the strengths of opening your publishing to the Fediverse.
Of course one of the critical points that I see is that of advertising collection and fundraising in general.
Publishing and monetization in fact go hand in hand, with the additional variable due to the fact that many online newspapers are actually fictitious and designed only to publish garbage pre-digested by artificial intelligence. In this scenario, real journalism finds itself facing new critical issues and unfair competition. Asking publishers to enter the Fediverse without solving this problem is very difficult
