Today, Medium is launching a Mastodon instance at me.dm to help our authors, publications and readers find a home in the fediverse. Mastodon is an emerging force for good in social media and we are excited to join this community.
Contrary to what the title suggests, it sounds like they aren’t actually planning on implementing ActivityPub on medium itself, but rather they are just launching a new medium-branded mastodon instance. 🥱
yeah it’s so bad, fuck medium
In this thread, the CEO mentions they might add AP but he believes shortform and longform content should be completely separate. I don’t think he realizes there’s no way to keep them separate on the fediverse. Any long form content that is federated can be found on microblogging fediverse software (as it should be; the idea that they should be separate platforms is dumb)
Yeah, it really is the UI that does the job. A UI that truncates posts >500 characters behind a “show more” button already gets you closer to a microblogging platform.
more interesting question is how tf did medium manage to make TEXT so load goddamn slow lol 🤯
Medium is even one of the ones explicitly called out here: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
They managed to make displaying some text, a bloated javascript spyware mess.
so bad it’s impressive 🧐
Love to see it. Mastodon is a trojan horse that companies are joining to keep up with technology, but it’s taking the power out from underneath them. See what happened to Raspberry Pi after they moved to Mastodon and still tried to keep their community on a string :)
I’m out of the loop regarding Raspberry Pi, Mastodon, and the community. What happened?
There was some silly drama because they shared something about a police officer who used their products. No doubt everyone forgot about that within a few days, thats how Masotodon is.
No, they didn’t share a post about how a police officer used their products.
They shared about because they were bragging about hiring a police officer that used to use their products to do surveillance before he started working for them.
Then when they were called out for that, they doubled down
Like I said, pointless drama that no one cared about for more than a couple of days. As usual on Mastodon.
In my experience, people very much still care about it…
The outrage was apparently about how Raspberry Pi replied to comments on Mastodon after their announcement. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspberry-pi-hired-ex-cop-mastodon-controversy @snek_boi@lemmy.ml
The replies were beyond inept for a social media manager.
The fediverse is the best way to undermine the control of the web by big data brothers, its not so important if you use Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica, Lemmy or any other decentralized network, cuestion of personal taste, need or preferences.
I wonder why they’re doing this, considering that the fediverse has the ability to break medium’s stranglehold on long-form blogging too. Writefreely and plume already do what medium does, but better, and already plugged into the fediverse.
@muad_dibber @ragica Hmmm, likely hoping to give their writers a reason to stay, and federating will likely come when they feel that they need to leverage their brand to keep users from jumping ship.
Nice. Medium is a blog-type site, right? Wish they mentioned if they were working on having the blogs be federated.
They won’t because their business model is exactly the opposite. They host your blog but then only allow viewers to read like 5 articles per month until they have to pay a subscription. Or something like that, it’s one of those deeply annoying websites that I don’t understand why anyone uses it.
scribe.rip goes brrrrrrr.
The WaPo bans showed that social media should be controlled in-house (or at least appear to be, like email.) Medium is just a bit ahead of the curve. Expect others to follow.
So basically medium running their own mastodon instance, and making sure their workers use it rather than twitter or something, is a way to keep them in line?
Sure, that could be one benefit to an organization.
However, my point was that the organization can control their messaging, rather than following the whims and rules of a conflicting company.
Having an official fediverse presence makes sense for a company, like you say. But I think there’s better ways to do it than running a mastodon instance and encouraging your employees to make their acct their is a bad idea.
Medium is a blogging platform and companies usually write full length blogs for announcements. To me, integrating AP into medium and using that as a direct fediverse presence makes more sense.
Individuals shouldn’t have to make multiple accounts (like a personal, fun acct & an official, professional acct) and having your acct controlled by your employer is a pretty shitty situation.
Why not both? Replacing their existing Twitter profile with Mastodon doesn’t remove the possibility to integrate AP into their platform. It probably makes it more likely.
If they wanna do both, they can. I’m just saying I don’t think it’s the best use of their resources because running a mastodon instance is a huge task. And companies having a Twitter profile was only necessary to get their blog posts noticed. On the fediverse, there’s no reason for that extra step when you could just follow the blog directly. That’s less work for the reader and less work for the poster and no extra service required.
It probably makes it more likely.
I disagree. Running an instance doesn’t give you any insight into how to implement ActivityPub and anybody can study the source code without running an instance. There are quite a few orgs running instances, but, as far as I know, WordPress is the only widely known software that has actually integrated AP and they never ran their own instance.
You’d be surprised what corporations dump resources into.
