On Social Media

Twitter was an amazing resource for journalists that peaked in the early 2010s as a global resource. In 2022 it was purchased by Elon Musk and many journalists (and users) reduced their use of the system or migrated to other platforms like BlueSky and Mastodon. Twitter and its algorithm were good to journalists because breaking news would be elevated to multiple timelines and show up in trending hashtags, and they could click into individual posts to get context and reach out to individual users who might be close to the action with replies and direct messages.

Mastodon is one of the successors to Twitter and many journalists have shifted many of their efforts there. Mastodon’s method of social media is not based on any one corporation or owner like Twitter or Facebook which makes it resilient against censorship. There is no central arbiter of trending topics or tags. It is arranged in a cluster of thousands of individually run servers or “instances” where people can set up accounts like they would an email address.

Many instances are for people who have things in common professionally, geographically, or hobby based. For instance there are instances for journalists including federated.press, journa.host and newsie.host. Instances for the DMV area include dmv.social, and the Philadelphia area hosts jawns.club (“jawn” being a slang term local to Philadelphia). Even though people would sign up to individual instances, anyone can follow an account on any other instance in the world.

Mastodon had a slow start but has begin to come into its own as a breaking or trending news source. Large earthquakes, for example, can be seen on the network with a trending #earthquake hashtag and posts from local residents. The secret to Mastodon is following lots of people early and boosting (what Twitter used to call a retweet) content that you appreciate so that others can see it.

A downside of Mastodon is that many elected and appointed officials have not joined Mastodon the way they did with Twitter so often official information will not be seen on the network unless someone pulls it from another source. In those cases it might be more useful to go to Facebook and other large social media properties with search functions to find your information.