In this guest post, Alexander Plaum, Innovation Manager at Deutsche Welle (DW), writes about his team's exceptionally positive experience with microblogging in the Fediverse. He also explains why all public broadcasting professionals should try out Mastodon.
Over the past approx. 100 days, dw_innovation@mastodon.social has made 2 or 3 public replies. The idea of using any of these social networks over RSS/Atom feeds and plain old websites is that they’re social, not a place you upload text.
As a freedom loving hippie, I’d rather see broadcasters posting to the fediverse instead of whatever awful mish mash of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter et al. it is right now! That would be fantastic!
But as a technical purist, the way DW is using their account right now, they’re arguably no worse off getting links/content from their RSS feeds available to the fediverse somehow (e.g. RSS Parrot). Sometimes I feel like we’ve had walled gardens for so long that we’ve forgotten about interoperability. Lots of platform thinking! Broadcasters don’t need to be on the fediverse, just a way that their stuff can be shared to the fediverse.
I’m excited to see things changing that makes thinking like this even possible!