Medium embraces Twitter alternative Mastodon with launch of its own community • businessroundups.org

Online publishing platform Mediumoriginally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced today it embraces the open-source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. The company said it is launching i.dma Mastodon community that will provide reliable infrastructure, moderation, and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things.

Although Mastodon launched six years ago, it has gained popularity more recently as users fled Elon Musk’s Twitter. Since taking over the social network, Musk has made a series of controversial decisions, such as re-enabling the accounts of white supremacists and former President Donald Trump and banning journalists, amid a reduction in Twitter’s moderation teams. He’s also been tinkering with Twitter’s product, promising to unauthenticate users who don’t pay for the service. while advertisers are alienatedputting the future of Twitter in jeopardy.

That has left a subset of Twitter users looking for new places to serve as a place to post their thoughts and participate in public conversations. Mastodon is one of the platforms that directly benefited from it.

The social microblogging platform has grown to 2.5 million monthly active users in recent days, an increase of only 300,000 in October 2022. However, the service is not exactly a Twitter clone due to its decentralized nature. Rather than joining “Mastodon” itself, members join communities, or agencies, that have their own rules, moderation guidelines, and home timelines. While this does not prevent a user from following another user in another community, it is expected that many will choose to join a community that reflects their specific interests, such as technology, music, security, gaming or any of the many other topics.

That seems to be the case here with Medium’s Mastodon entry. The company is opening up Mastodon to Medium writers and readers as an added benefit of Medium membership, creating a place for discussions about Medium’s content. This will result in an “interesting local feed,” the company explained in its announcement.

Medium also says it will be easier to find people and topics that match their interests when they join Mastodon, as part of the onboarding workflow.

As part of this effort, Medium will be creating a “sign-up with Medium” interface to join Mastodon, which could help address some users’ complaints about the difficulties of getting started with Mastodon. take, which can be confusing because of the initial instance selection process.

While it may seem strange for a longer-form blogging platform to embrace one designed for much shorter posts, Medium believes it’s worth operating in both spaces.

“We think Medium’s mission — to deepen people’s understanding of the world by helping share the best ideas and best information — transcends mediums,” CEO Tony Stubblebine wrote in a blog post. (Williams left Medium as CEO last year.)

“So far we have focused on writing articles. That’s how our company got its name: as a home for medium length texts on the internet. Mastodon, on the other hand, is primarily for short form writing of 500 characters or less… Today we’re extending what we’re doing to the short medium (lower case m) with an instance on Mastodon, i.dm,” he said.

Medium’s move to embrace Mastodon isn’t just because it sees the platform as “an emerging force for good in social media,” as Stubblebine wrote when explaining the company’s interest in the space.

In reality, companies like Medium could suffer if Twitter experienced a downturn in the Musk era. To date, Twitter has served as a way for publishers to promote their work, engage in discussions with their readership, and grow their following. As more writers and readers leave Twitter, platforms like Medium could also lose traction, especially if the writer didn’t have a strong flow elsewhere on social media. A Mastodon community could help address that problem by providing a place for those discussions to continue beyond Twitter.

Medium isn’t alone in realizing the need to find a Twitter alternative. Newsletter publisher Substack recently launched a discussion feature that enables short chats between writers and readers within its own app. Flipboard also launched a Notes feature for a similar purpose last month. And Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, said in November that Tumblr would adopt ActivityPubthe decentralized social networking protocol that powers Mastodon.

For Mastodon, launching a Medium instance could help boost his numbers as a Medium even further today praises a network of more than 100 million readers. Even if only a small percentage of them joined Medium’s Mastodon, it could represent quite an influx of new “fediverse” users, as the Mastodon network servers are called.

Medium says it will invite select authors and publications to participate tomorrow an early group of testers before we invite all writers and readers in the near future.