Image: Can Mastodon be a reasonable Twitter substitute for journalists? created by Nightcafe

At the Rethink Journalism hackathons, we take a look under the hood of tools like wepublish, take questions and ideas from newsdesks and go for a test-drive, get to know their tech teams and primary users.

On participant request, a short workshop on publishing in the Fediverse was hosted at the Bajour office. Some of us continued work on setting up a Mastodon instance, with the Press Codex as governing principle. We researched some governance models that help to create thriving communities around discussing the news.

Our initial hypthesis, is that the Fediverse can provide not only a viable alternative for promoting content, but also to facilitating online discussion, and even as infrastructure for crowdsourced and investigative journalism. The combination of these previously disparate processes into one powerful cross-platform medium, should empower individual journalists and newsdesks in years to come.

Results

We set up an alpha instance of GoToSocial (a new, Mastodon-compatible project) at the hackathon, and a few days later set up a second server with an installation of the official Mastodon server. A domain name (fedi.watch) was reserved, and an open wiki (GitHub) set up to collect ideas and initiatives from the community.

• Campaign: fedi.watch
• Alpha test: GoToSocial
• Beta test: Mastodon
• Wiki: GitHub

The Challenge

People are shifting from Twitter to Mastodon, and if I'm correct, it's like a protected space where we can set rules and manage issues together. If people sign up and post to a protected instance for journalists, they should have a Code of Conduct (Presserat Codex) that sets rules and trust levels for people who join. The questions we would like to explore at the hackathon are:

• How to use Fediverse for journalism?
• What is the potential of it? How is the social space governed?
• Do not reproduce The Bird, use the open tools!
• How does the ActivityPub protocol work, that allows people to follow across networks and services?

Presented by ^miriam ^samuel

Team

• Miriam is working for Netzcourage.
• Samuel is a journalist and technologist with Bajour.
• Oleg supports events and infrastructures at Opendata.ch.

Process

We are setting up a beta test environment with Fediverse (Mastodon) news products. We will introduce this service for journalism, and invite others to join the beta test environment. We have used federated services and protocols, and will share our experience as well as helping to connect useful tools and data sets to the needs of journalists who wish to create an online presence, or run investigations and content curation in the Fediverse.

Workshop

We ran a workshop on Friday with the group of journalists at the hackathon and explored a number of issues, suggested lots of starting points. These are documented in the Readme tab above and can be expanded on in our pad: https://pad.okfn.de/p/rejoha22-fediverse

On Friday night we tried to install a Mastodon server using Ansible and Heroku. Both did not work out of the box. We tried to look for a simple, up to date, one-click solution to deploying Mastodon. With all the people trying to run an instance, this seems to be a gap. We tried:

• https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-ansible
• https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-mastodon
• https://elements.heroku.com/buttons/tootsuite/mastodon
• https://cloud.linode.com/stackscripts/community?query=mastodon

There is a list of "dedicated Mastodon hosting providers" at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/

We thought it would be quite fun to run Mastodon on a Raspi, and flashed an SD card on a Raspberry Pi 4. However we had issues getting a screen connected and let this idea go.

On Saturday we branched out a bit: Miriam did some research but had to leave at lunch, Oleg did a bit more work here but mostly helped other teams, and brainstormed infosec topics - then briefly presented our status.

Since Sunday, we have an alpha instance is up and running at https://alpha.openlegallab.ch/ - based on:

Ask Oleg for an account and instructions if you would like to try it!