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.
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.
Wait their articles are paywalled. Are they only going to federate the clickbait teaser intros?
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.
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.
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.
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)
I don’t think that’s new, you just need to throw in a personal subscription key in the URL
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…
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?
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)
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.
I love 404 Media. I wish i had enough disposable income to support them.
How about corporations fuck off? Let us have our own small slice of people own and ran Internet back again.
The nice thing about the fediverse is that you could start your own instance and not federate with them
…or block them.
Yeah but now they have to play by our rules or get defederated. We are no longer at the mercy of profit motives.
I see no problem with this, if they federate instances can choose to pick them up or not
