You Have the Power - Part 2
One thing I have learned is that when I grasp the obvious, others are quick to do it too. As I was drafting You Have the Power , I realized that there was a tremendous opportunity for journalism and journalists with the Mastodon solution.
You could be a Mastodon admin. You could host your own server. You think Counter.Social looks like a first year Uni student’s Dorm Room and there is no way you will use it? Build your own. You have the power. You have the value. You are the product.
You cannot build your own Twitter. That’s closed source proprietary product. But you could build your own Mastodon based social media site.
That last sentence is of tremendous value to anyone wanting to control their brand and their image on Social Media. And today I see others have reached the same conclusion:
The potential collapse of Twitter is an opportunity. So many of the issues of Twitter for journalists and other organizations wanting to engage on social media are solved by controlling their own presence.
For example, Journalism Schools could setup Mastodon instances for their students and alumni to publish on and create a level of trust and verification for the broader user community. And if they find that user reaction is too toxic, they can go to publish only. They don’t have to accept comments back. Yes, solutions create their own problems, there is no one perfect solution, but by having control, the Mastodon instance owner can make those hard choices for themselves. And not wait for some content moderations council at some third-party corporation to decide if anything should be done… eventually.
In Canada, this is almost a no brainer for public news organizations like CBC and TVO. They can divorce themselves from the problematic corporate platforms like Twitter and Facebook and manage their own brand identity without the risk posed by associating with toxic Social Media Corporations.
To reword my conclusion from You Have the Power, Part 1.
Don’t sell yourself so cheaply. These billionaires think enough of your brand to feed off it for their own profit motivations.
Don’t give in to them.
