October 28, 2022

s13e17: A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Friday, October 28, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and it is a grey, overcast, not really raining but might if it feels like it generally damp kind of day.

Just one thing today.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 A Proposal For News Organization Mastodon Servers

Well, it happened¹, I guess, so here’s the inevitable thinking about The Next Phase Of Social Networking [sic].

First thing that’s caught my attention is the desire for, say, news organizations (as opposed to Brands) to show up on Mastodon so you can follow them.

But the federated nature of Mastodon means we can do this a little bit differently, so here’s a proposal:

The first news organization to stand up a Mastodon / activitypub server at, for example, follow.washingtonpost.com gets a medal.²

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. A news organization (or any organization, let’s just start with news) already asserts ownership of its domain e.g. via its certificate, so we piggyback trust off its domain.
2. It stands up a Mastodon or other social server at a standard address. I’d propose follow.washingtonpost.com but there’s a bunch of reasons why you might do something else, see below, and uses the agreed well-known autodiscovery protocol to return the address for its Mastodon server (but I don’t see an entry for activitypub or Mastodon yet).
3. It creates accounts for its staff on its Mastodon server. Nobody else gets an account; the public can’t sign up.

What you get:

Verified accounts. Instead of relying on a third party to “verify” your account by sticking a blue check against your display name, account provenance and “verification” is inherited as a property of the Mastodon server. If your account is eg @alexpetri@follow.washingtonpost.com then provided you’re not being domain name phished or the server’s not been compromised, then only whoever runs washingtonpost.com has created those accounts.

Ease of discovery. This is a bit of a side-issue. The deal with the autodiscovery protocol and the standardized naming is that all a user would have to do, to find Washington Post accounts to follow, would be to know the washingtonpost.com domain. Autodiscovery would let your Mastodon client point itself to the appropriate server.

Some bits and pieces. Normally you’d name a server off a subdomain after the protocol, like {imap, smtp, www}.washingtonpost.com. Most of these don’t even exist anymore as organizations outsource their infrastructure to third parties and DNS points those servers somewhere else anyway.

So the argument is that you’d name your Mastodon server after the protocol, i.e. activitypub.washingtonpost.com.

You’d do this because: look, it makes sense. That’s how we’ve always named infrastructure. It’s descriptive and at that point, not supposed to be user-facing. Also, autodiscovery means a user only needs to know the parent domain, and the protocol-specific client knows what it’s looking for and can just do a GET on /.well-known/ for whatever.

You wouldn’t do this if you thought people would actually type in the URL, like, ever. In which case you might not want to name the server after the protocol, but after the action. Which is why I picked following.washingtonpost.com because… it’s about following the organization?

Now, this isn’t completely out of the ordinary. We also have domains for specific purposes. A whole bunch of organizations have standardized on support as a subdomain, e.g. support.{apple, microsoft,[google](https://support.microsoft.com/en-US),playstation}.com. So for certain user-facing services that happen, in these cases, to be served over https, purpose-named subdomains totally work.

I mentioned above that only organization users would get an account, and I think that’s right. So the reason why you might want to actually have follow.washingtonpost.com rather than {protocol}.washingtonpost.com is that your subdomain name is protocol agnostic. You can stick RSS feeds there, if you want. If something comes along later to supplant activitypub and also has a web interface, you can stick that there too.

Not just news organizations

Okay, so you don’t just have to do it for news organizations. Obviously anyone can set up a Mastodon server, that’s the whole point. But the federation means that “official” accounts become “more official” when their server home is hung off the domain of the actual organization.

You wouldn’t need Twitter (or anyone else, really) to verify that the UK Prime Minister’s account is official, because you’d have following.gov.uk as the Mastodon server, which means you can trust that server as much as you trust .gov.uk domains. In fact, if you really wanted to, there might even be a way of displaying/viewing the domain cert of the parent domain, just in case you really really wanted to check. A sort of HTTPS-style padlock or bluecheck, but based on a Let’s Encrypt type model.

You want verifiable US government social media accounts? Run them all off their .gov domains. Government sites are already (have already been, for years now) encouraged to run off .gov domains instead of the more distressing {countyname}.net or {countynameassessorsoffice}.org.

So in this way sure, Bill Gates gets @billg@gatesfoundation.org and that inherits all the trust in the gatesfoundation.org domain. People get to keep their personal accounts separate from “trustable”, “verifiable” professional accounts. Your university or college wants you to have a social media account? Sure, you can have it hosted at following.ucla.edu. You can even mirror your professional content at your personal Mastodon account at whatever damn server you want.

If I get a bit optimistic about this, it might help cut down on influencer/respreading type accounts?

And yes, brands can get in on it. Sure. That way there’s a tiny chance you’re following the Proper Brand Account rather than a Parody Brand Account, which… is probably for the best. Or it’s easier to see that a Parody Account is a Parody Account because you can look at the parent server. I don’t love it, because the whole point, as The Onion pointed out, is that you should be momentarily fooled by the parody.

Anyway. A proposal.

Why wouldn’t you do this?

Well, it’s a bunch of work!

First, anytime you stand up a service, unless you explicitly make clear that it’s e.g. a short term test, then you’re going to have to maintain it forever. So whichever organization does this is going to either have an existing great digital strategy that allows for quick experimentation or it’s the kind of organization that approves stuff and doesn’t have a pattern for long-term plans.

Second, do you even know why you’re doing it? Twitter has been private for less than 24 hours and this is exuberance on the part of “look, we’re on a new social platform again!”. What’s it feel like?

This is like everyone simultaneously wandering around the cafeteria holding their trays looking for their friends. (Liza Daly)

Reasons to not do it:

• It’s a buzzword bandwagon thing and you don’t have a long-term strategy, it’s just so you can look like you’re doing the innovation. Sure, don’t do it, unless you have a plan for turning it off or, like, you actually have a goal in mind.
• You don’t have the resources. Again, see above: it’s a lot of work!
• You don’t have any journalists or staff who’re into it. At least, not yet.

Reasons to do it: * Buzzword bandwagon thing! You get an innovation medal! A disruption medal! You might pay a little cost in resource, but you might get that accidental first-mover advantage, which other than “first post!” you’d have to have a point of view on, see above: what’s your actual goal? * It’s your brand! You’re a new media techco and your whole thing is investing in the tech and CMS and so-on that lets you integrate everything together and your name starts with a V and ends in ox Media. * It’s where your early adopter audience is! I don’t know, are there the kind of people who read Teen Vogue on Mastodon? Are you an organization like The Samaritans, where Mastodon might be a good place to show up with resources about mental health? Are you an abortion information services provider? The problem with some of these examples is that as non-profits, they typically have the least resources/time/money to spare on doing something like this which may have, honestly, limited return.

Anyway. You can tell I’m excited. I think this is a good idea. You should forward it to whomever, I guess.

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That’s it for today!

How’s your Friday? It is Halloween weekend if you celebrate, I suppose.

Best,

Dan

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