Russia-Ukraine War Mega Thread | June 25 - July 8 2023
Please confine all news pertaining to Russia-Ukraine war to this thread exclusively. Any links shared outside of this thread will be subject to removal.
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Hi all ... kind of a meta non-news question.
I've been thinking about getting a person who writes great Russia-Ukraine threads over on Mastodon to post their threads here. I've got a general post about the possibility here: https://lemmy.ml/post/1528973.
I've also pestered @sabbah@lemmy.world via DM.
Just wondering what your thoughts are on whether there'd be a good fit here.
The main point is to make it as easy as possible for them by allowing them to post from mastodon still. So the ideal would be that they would create new posts here and create a thread within that post, to which people would be free to comment on of course.
Except that doesn't seem to fit within the rules here, especially rule [1.1] Submissions must be links to news articles..
Thing is, this person's threads are full of citations of or links to Telegram sources from within Russia or the region, basically a thread of primary sources that the author is compiling into a digestible narrative. It might really be something people here would appreciate, especially as I discovered them through links provided in a megathread on here.
Sooo ... I'm wondering what you think and whether there might be some scope to alter the rules and allow for this sort of thing ... the idea would be that it's something like a journalist live reporting.
Hi,
While Rule [1.1] applies to the main submission post, we would like to clarify that in the case of our mega thread, posting links to social media sources (such as Mastodon) is acceptable as they will be placed in the comments section of the thread.
As of now, we don't have much experience with cross-posting from Mastodon to Lemmy. However, if you can provide us with some examples, we can explore the possibility of incorporating it in some way. Your input and examples would greatly assist us in understanding the process better and potentially adopting it within our community.
On posting directly to a megathread ... thanks! While this is good, and has already happened in megathreads (I forget which I saw it in), it doesn't lean into the federation of content that can happen which is what I'm trying to see more of. That is, not just "cross-posting" but the same thread existing on two platforms simultaneously in much the same way lemmy communities exist on multiple instances simultaneously.
Otherwise, happy to talk about the mastodon<->lemmy "cross-posting".
Here's a basic demo I've written, posting from Mastodon to !test@lemmy.ml : https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095 And here's the view of the post on lemmy: https://lemmy.ml/post/1142168
You'll see that both lemmy and mastodon users can comment or reply with the only difference being how the two platforms display the threads (lemmy doing a much nicer job IMO)
The key machansim is that lemmy communities federate to mastodon as "users" that can be "at-ed" like any other user from mastodon. Lemmy then interprets such a post as a new post to the "at-ed" community, takes the first line as the title and the rest as the body. The only trickiness is that lemmy will only pay attention to the first "at-ed" handle, to prevent cross-posting and spam.
What I initially imagined was that someone could start their own journalistic megathreads here by doing exactly the above and then replying to their previous post to create a thread on mastodon and a chain of comments to a "megathread" post here on lemmy. This would be the easiest for the person posting from mastodon.
The difficulty for you is that it would be a post that isn't necessarily to a news source, but just a stand alone post ... though the person I'm asking on behalf of is almost always providing sources/links.
Beyond that there'd be your policy of confining all Russia-Ukraine war stuff to the megathread. On this, they could reply to the megathread and basically embed their mastodon thread within the megathread. This would work well. It's just that finding the megathread from mastodon and replying to it can be non-trivial and may not be available all the time.
For instance, I can't find the current megathread on my mastodon account and I don't know why ... it's probably an instance visibility problem and will get better now that I've subscribed/followed world@lemmy.world from my mastodon instance. So this may become a good way forward without much hassle.
As for the kind of threads I'm thinking of ... here's an example: https://hachyderm.io/@mariyadelano/110599817912125441
Thing is, this person’s threads are full of citations of or links to Telegram sources from within Russia or the region, basically a thread of primary sources that the author is compiling into a digestible narrative.
I think this would go against the general rule 1:
Accurate Sourcing: Share world news from reliable sources and verify information before posting.
I think based on that, this com is supposed to have content based on reliable sources with editorial oversight, like news organizations, so primary sources, especially unreliable stuff like telegram chats, would be way below that line.
That makes sense. A counter though, is I got the impression that the telegram sources are trying to hone in on the news coming out of Russia and Ukraine. So propaganda channels, state and independent news sources. How much of that is going on in her threads I’m not sure. My impression though was it is all an attempt to glean what’s really going on by trying to triangulate the various statements, however conflicting, coming from sources closest to events.
Either way, I think the idea is that this sort of thing is an example of journalism, however independent or unaffiliated, being done directly on a fediverse platform. It’s not “official” but it’s arguably interesting and compelling.
From a fediverse perspective, there’s an interesting question of how to stage this sort of work here, where compared to Twitter, the fediverse is struggling to get journalistic activity in here directly.
Mastodon isn’t great, due to a lack of search and algorithms. Lemmy’s communities, threaded comments and up/down votes can maybe make something happen here, especially given how it can federate with lots of microblog users in a way Reddit never could.
See, for example, this perspective: https://plasmatrap.com/notes/9ghighuelyswt9vo
Which basically holds that the live independent journalistic activities that can happen on a social media platform can often precede and eclipse those of mainstream media. This is a big part of what gave Twitter its value and why mainstream media gave it so much attention despite not being the biggest platform.
I don’t know how much it happened on Reddit or how effectively. Obviously megsthreads are an attempt. But the advantage of the fediverse is that the various platforms can pool their resources and distribute information along multiple formats more directly.