The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.
If they do that, they can no longer complain that Meta is freeloading on them and get themselves banned by Meta like they did in Canada…
Sounds great
How about corporations fuck off? Let us have our own small slice of people own and ran Internet back again.
The nice thing about the fediverse is that you could start your own instance and not federate with them
Unfortunately in our capitalist hellscape, having corporations come in and try to profit off of your space is the price of success.
This is a sign that capitalists can’t actually fight the fediverse anymore, they can’t ignore it, they can only embrace it. I think that means that it’s on its way to being a successful protocol rather than a niche experiment.
The only question left there is whether the fediverse will make a significant change to how the internet operates and prevent monopolies from capturing the vast majority of social media like they have for the last decade or so. I think it’s got a decent chance of that.
Wait their articles are paywalled. Are they only going to federate the clickbait teaser intros?
I could read the full article, not sure what’s going on.
Anyway, the journalist is writing about the Verge and 404 Media, and the more general potential benefits for the industry. There’s nothing about Digiday.com following the same path.
It’s a nice write-up. The main things I learned is that the Verge is transitioning to WordPress, and 404 is using Ghost. Both hope to activate the ActivityPub capabilities of these platforms when they’re ready - the Verge when it finishes transitioning, 404 when Ghost implants AP support.
Wait their articles are paywalled.
Journalists have to pay for food and rent too. What is the alternative? ads?
The money has to come from somewhere.
I didn’t read Solrize’s comment as saying “There shouldn’t be paywalls,” just asking the very legitimate question as to how they will interact with federation.
Interestingly, 404 just solved something kinda related: they developed a way for subscribers to get a custom RSS feed address, so they can access paywalled articles directly in their RSS reader. TMK, they are the first publication to do this. I imagine they would do something similar for federation. (I believe that if any of the custom RSS feeds show huge traffic numbers, 404 shuts it down, but I’m not sure)
