You will notice that underneath some links shared on Mastodon, the author byline can be clicked to open the author’s associated fediverse account, right in the app. This highlights writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse, and makes it easier than ever to follow them and keep up with their future work—potentially across different publications.
The handle can be any fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That includes Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, and many others.
I’m not sure how I feel about it. Don’t want this to cause “share” bots networks which will pump particular posters. Next logical think to do is to start showing more from those posters, which will kill the hole point of consuming content from fediverse for me. I don’t want to see same things from same people. I want diverse content from different posters
That’s why they are starting only with verified sites. To combat the spam feature. But of course, they are creating a closed system with that. Which also is not the best
Easy fix.
Make blocking a poster block posts containing their articles, too. It makes avoiding nonsense easier, not harder. Then streamline the ability to share and collaborate on collaborate on curation (both “read this” and blacklists) and leave the power in the hands of the users. Once the tooling works, you could, as a host, suggest “recommended blacklists” or “recommended curators” for new users.
The bonus of this is that you can still moderate and ban clear “over the line” stuff (whatever your standards are), but stuff that’s more controversial doesn’t have to have users exactly match their instance, and they aren’t forced to migrate if their/their instances stances change. (That doesn’t mean don’t actually ban racism or malware or spam bots. You could use the same list tool to ban all that without doing it personally every time. But people who think you should ban more stuff that they don’t like would have alternate ways to handle it.)