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.

  • maegul (he/they)
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • maegul (he/they)
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.