Hey #Journalists that are joining Mastodon! 👋
Happy to have you here.
Now please, learn how Mastodon works, and start reporting on it honestly. Every mainstream source that writes about it gets things atrociously wrong.
I get that it's really different than traditional social media, but journalistic integrity means doing your research before you publish something, and some of these articles are just ridiculously incorrect. They're hard to take seriously. Like this: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63999452
They call Mastodon a "rival" to Twitter, which from a business perspective isn't true. It's like calling email and Facebook "rivals".
They claim Instances are separated by topic, which is partially true, but not even remotely the rule.
They refer to the flagship instance as simply as "Social", which is just the gTLD after the word "Mastodon", not the name of the instance!
Agree on most of your post but objecting to their equating instance with server is a bit pedantic. The BBC writes for a general audience. A general audience is not going to go into that much detail.
@the_rabid_rabbit I really can't agree that journalists should use incorrect wording to dumb it down for the general public. Tech reporting can be both understandable and precise.
If they want to use "instance" and "server" interchangeably, they owe their audience an explanation as to what they are talking about, and the fact that they are also using the terms "channel" and "group" here suggests they don't actually know what they are talking about.
@the_rabid_rabbit I also think that it's backwards logic to say that the BBC isn't responsible for accurately reporting on this because their readers won't fully understand it.
How are their readers supposed to fully understand it if the BBC is inaccurately reporting on it? A journalists job is to inform the public, not entertain them with dumbed down stories that don't reflect reality.
Heh. Look, I'm a DevOps guy and I struggle to explain to even technical people the difference between a pod, a container, and a VM. You are hopelessly optimistic that if they explained the actual architecture of a masto instance that it would be understood. Don't sweat the small stuff 🙂
@the_rabid_rabbit And I'm a Software Support Engineer with a B.A. in Journalism, and I can tell you that the BBC article is awful and shouldn't have made it past an editor worth their salt.
I'm not optimistic that the BBC can doing any better than this, they've been going downhill for years, but I certainly won't accept this kind of reporting as normal.
They don't need to explain how Ruby, PostgreSQL, Redis, and ActivityPub works, they just needed not to make things up and spread falsehoods...
On second thought and after a reread I do agree with you. That was pretty bad.
@the_rabid_rabbit And I do agree with you that, in isolation, using the terms "instance" and "server" interchangeable isn't a particularly big deal and is pretty much ubiquitous in this community . It was definitely the least of my concerns, but it seemed relevant to bring up the specifics given how many interchangeable terms they injected into the article.
@Alex@vran.as This reads like an onion article. 😕
@fyrfli I would love to see an Onion article explaining Mastodon. I can see it now:
"On English language instances posts are referred to as 'Toots', which is attributed to a mistranslation from German where they are called 'Fahrts'."
@Alex The BBC wouldn't recognise journalistic integrity in an identity parade.
It's embarrassing to see the BBC do this.
They refer to it as a "site". No, it is not a website, it is a piece of web software. Would you call all the WordPress blogs a "site"?
They refer to instances interchangeably as "channels", "groups", and "servers". Mastodon does not have channels or groups, and instance ≠ server. An instance could be a cluster of servers mixed with SaaS solutions.