9mo ago

Mastodon rolls out built-in bylines for journalists in the fediverse

www.theverge.com

I think this is a good incentive for Journalists to be more active on the fediverse.

7 comments

It's certainly better than all those verification scams that were popping up after a lot of journos migrated off Twitter...
Speaking of bylines, at this time of writing the only comment on the Verge piece claims that "'Fediverse' is the dumbest possible name [and] we gotta come up with a different one". Signed, "DarthLazers" 🤣

It works in a pretty neat way:
We’ve decided to create a new kind of OpenGraph tag—the same kind of tags you have on your website to determine which thumbnail image will appear on the preview for the page when shared on Discord, iMessage, or Mastodon. It looks like this: meta name="fediverse:creator" content="@Gargron@mastodon.social" /.
via: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/
- A neat way would be to re-use one the 200 already existing standards like rel="author" or even rel="me" (which mastodon already supports anyway). This solution just is just NIH-driven development.
  
  I think the difference lies in two things:
  You can share an article from a user of a different instance. In this case, your instance will have to look up the rel="author" tag and check whether the URL is a fediverse instance. I'm not sure whether this is scalable as compared to a tag that directly indicates that the author is on the fediverse. Imagining a scenario where there are 100, 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 instances on different versions.
  The tag is to promote that the author is on the fediverse. If the rel="author" tag points to twitter for example, maybe Eugen Rochko + team didn't want a post on the fediverse to link to twitter.
  These are my thoughts and idk if they're valid. But I think just reusing the rel="author" isn't the most elegant solution.
  I know that mastodon already uses rel="me" for link verification (I use it on mu website + my mastodon account), but that's a different purpose - that's more for verification. There's still no way of guaranteeing that the rel="author" tag points to a fediverse account. You're putting the onus on the mastodon instance.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge.
Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.
You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.
It can also lead to a person’s profile on Threads, Flipboard, WordPress with ActivityPub, PeerTube, and others.
Mastodon is working to open up the feature to more outlets, too, but it currently requires “manual review” to prevent “malicious sites framing users as their authors.” However, Mastodon plans on launching “a self-serve system” to manage the sites authors can appear from in the future.
Even though it’s not widely rolled out just yet, it does seem like a neat way to quickly find out who wrote an article and check out their other work across multiple platforms.
The original article contains 242 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Neat. I wish more people would migrate to Mastodon. I’ve never been a big Twatter guy, but there’s a handful of people I’d like to see updates from who are trapped by their following there.

7 comments