The fediverse is a breath of fresh air for writers and social media
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.
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?
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.