Why publishers are preparing to federate their sites
digiday.com
The Verge and 404 Media are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement.

The Verge and 404 Media are building out new functions that would allow them to distribute posts on their sites and on federated platforms – like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky – at the same time. Replies to those posts on those platforms become comments on their sites.

  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
    751·
    5 months ago

    Wait their articles are paywalled. Are they only going to federate the clickbait teaser intros?

    • aasatru@kbin.earth
      25·
      5 months ago

      I could read the full article, not sure what’s going on.

      Anyway, the journalist is writing about the Verge and 404 Media, and the more general potential benefits for the industry. There’s nothing about Digiday.com following the same path.

      It’s a nice write-up. The main things I learned is that the Verge is transitioning to WordPress, and 404 is using Ghost. Both hope to activate the ActivityPub capabilities of these platforms when they’re ready - the Verge when it finishes transitioning, 404 when Ghost implants AP support.

    • Metz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1210·
      5 months ago

      Wait their articles are paywalled.

      Journalists have to pay for food and rent too. What is the alternative? ads?

      The money has to come from somewhere.

      • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        5 months ago

        Paywalls just don’t mix that well with federation. The teasers are basically ads, and why would fediverse volunteers want to propagate some company’s ads? The non-federated model they are using now seems fine.

      • mulcahey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        5 months ago

        I didn’t read Solrize’s comment as saying “There shouldn’t be paywalls,” just asking the very legitimate question as to how they will interact with federation.

        Interestingly, 404 just solved something kinda related: they developed a way for subscribers to get a custom RSS feed address, so they can access paywalled articles directly in their RSS reader. TMK, they are the first publication to do this. I imagine they would do something similar for federation. (I believe that if any of the custom RSS feeds show huge traffic numbers, 404 shuts it down, but I’m not sure)

        • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          5 months ago

          I don’t think that’s new, you just need to throw in a personal subscription key in the URL

      • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        The money comes from the companies that are hiring them to do the journalist work. Of course.

        Let’s be intellectually honest here. If a company has enough money that the boss can brand themself as “CEO” then it can pay at least living wages.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    28·
    5 months ago

    If they do that, they can no longer complain that Meta is freeloading on them and get themselves banned by Meta like they did in Canada…

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    14·
    5 months ago

    I’d be really happy about anything bringing more people on Lemmy and the Fediverse, so I wouldn’t complain about it.

    Maybe I’m not seeing the big picture as some people seem to be scared of such a move.

  • Quokka@quokk.auEnglish
    2112·
    5 months ago

    How about corporations fuck off? Let us have our own small slice of people own and ran Internet back again.

    • YourAvgMortal@lemmy.worldEnglish
      461·
      5 months ago

      The nice thing about the fediverse is that you could start your own instance and not federate with them

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      381·
      5 months ago

      Yeah but now they have to play by our rules or get defederated. We are no longer at the mercy of profit motives.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      202·
      5 months ago

      Unfortunately in our capitalist hellscape, having corporations come in and try to profit off of your space is the price of success.

      This is a sign that capitalists can’t actually fight the fediverse anymore, they can’t ignore it, they can only embrace it. I think that means that it’s on its way to being a successful protocol rather than a niche experiment.

      The only question left there is whether the fediverse will make a significant change to how the internet operates and prevent monopolies from capturing the vast majority of social media like they have for the last decade or so. I think it’s got a decent chance of that.

  • QualifiedKitten@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    Any idea how things might be handled when things get crossposted? Will replies on the crossposted threads also become comments on their sites? Or only replies to the original post?

    • kopper [they/them]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      Lemmy’s cross posts are separate posts that just happen to link to the same thing. so only replies to the original post would be sent with the current design.

      that said, i severely doubt Lemmy will gain anything from this. publishers will not be sending out their posts to any communities, and i highly doubt they will expose any fep-1b12 group actors you can subscribe as a community.

      kbin/mbin with it’s ability to follow users may work better, assuming people test their federation with software other than mastodon, and accept any of the interoperability bugs as actual bugs instead of ignoring them. (lemmy itself is no stranger to this: the fact that users and communities can share the same username break quite a bit)

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        23 days ago

        I know this is a late reply but Lemmy recently gained support for wordpress blogs as communities so this will likely be positive for us here as well. Though it would be good if we had profile following and discovery similar to mbin and kbin in the future.