"We can have a different web, if we want it"

The run up to FediForum was hard, as we worked to pull a ton of things together. After taking a month off to recharge, this blog is back in action. 

It’s almost our birthday

We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the launch of Newsmast - Halloween! We’ll fix up some spooky birthday celebrations, but ahead of that it’s a good time to reflect on where we’ve been, what we’ve done and where we’re heading. Looking up at the stars, checking our compass, choosing our paths carefully, taking one step at a time - all that good stuff. Not to mention looking back over some of the blog posts from the summer. Here’s how it’s looking.

We’re an educational micro-blogging charity

We’re often so busy, doing so many different things, that we can sometimes lose sight of this.

The Newsmast Foundation is probably the world’s first and only charity dedicated to “advancing education, collective knowledge and the provision of information, news and comment on matters of public interest through the promotion of micro-blogging.”

That’s a quote from our Articles of Association. It took a long while to persuade the UK Charity Commission that micro-blogging could be educational, rather than shit-posting, dunking, engagement-hacking, disinformation or whatever else it people use it for. But we did it.

Now we’re putting this mission to life by creating Channel.org. A membership organisation onboarding socially committed organisations to new social, with the aim of helping them build communities, spreading content as knowledge for all for good.

New social: "we can have a different web, if we want it"

We’re playing around with new ways to describe the open, social web. Molly White, quoted here, is the North Star. Reclaiming social media through POSSE - and now the leading quote on this blog. Old social is fragmented, walled gardens, billionaires owning what you do online. New social is for us all, a digital commons, where we can choose our channels and own our content and communities. 

At Newsmast we’ve always been clear that we put people before protocols, politics before plumbing. It’s nice to see Dot Social thinks the same. That’s not going to change for us.

Organisations, organisations, organisations

This is the next thing which is coming into focus as some of the smoke around us clears. As a small charity, we can’t bring lots of new users to the wider social web. There are plenty of platforms better placed to do this. Bluesky, Flipboard, Ghost for starters. And hopefully many more coming along.

Socially-minded organisations are a more realistic target for us. We’ve been putting out feelers, and we believe we can make a big impact. What’s exciting is that we’re putting education first, technology second. The technology is just there to enable the bigger goals to happen: making a long-term commitment to new social, building and owning communities and sharing knowledge.

Over the summer we did a lot of work on organisations, and the tools they already have in place to join the new social movement. Wordpress, Discourse and Buffer for example. Over the rest of this year we’ll hopefully build alliances with all these and more.

We’ve also taken a hard look at what we’re doing with Channel.org. Bluesky uses custom feeds as DIY algorithms. For Dan Romero at Farcaster they’re cozy corners, places for people to gather.

We’re doing something different. We’re going to use channels as the enabling technology for the organisations we bring on board. Small numbers, big impact. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Hello again LinkedIn

Back when this blog first started I took a tour of social media platforms. LinkedIn was one of the big surprises. Now we’re back. When you’re looking for independent publishers, non-profits and academic institutions, there’s only one place they all hang out. LinkedIn. It’s a completely weird place - and having dabbled in it for a few months, it’s time to go all in. Expect selfies, hard-selling carousels and shameless plugs. All built around individual profiles, not the organisation. Wish us luck!

Making hard choices

Over the summer, we were trying to do so much that we burnt out a little. Now we’re setting some priorities.

First up, we’re going to deliver Channel.org: a membership organisation above everything, with some cool tech behind the scenes. Realistically that’s going to take us through to the end of 2024. We’ll also be starting our outreach work for new social, and making a mark on LinkedIn. Along the way we’ll hopefully put in place some pilot organisations working with Channel.org. And we’d like to build some partnerships, around education, marketing, technology and content curation. That’s already a heck of a lot to do.

We're aiming to stick to our roots too, by opening up our custom channel feeds so that anyone can use Patchwork to create a curated feed account, or form a Group with content from approved followers.

All that means our Patchwork plug-ins are going to have to wait a little, until early 2025. We’re working on local channels for servers, and that’s hard. Newsmast, where it all began, is going to have to wait until next year for a channel oriented revamp too. 

It’s been quite the year, so we look forward to carving pumpkins, bobbing apples and sharing costumes on social media. Better get those sweets (or candies!) ready, it’s time for trick or treat!

PS: Kamala Harris News Group - let’s win it!

The Kamala Harris News Group is one of the best things we’re supporting right now - all made possible by Mastodon plus Patchwork. There’s a great article about it on WeDistribute: The Revolution will be Federated.

Enormous thanks to Tim Chambers and the team for all the hard work they put into this every day. For those of us around the world, watching, knowing how much it matters, we say thank you! Keep up the fight and good luck in the final push for votes. We’re all behind you!