I’ve never been much of a social media person. I’ve never had a Facebook account, a Twitter account, an Instragram account, etc. The only social media platform I ever used much was G+ … which could tell you it may not be worth your time to read the rest of this post.

But with the latest Twitter imbroglios I was motivated to dust off my circa 2017 Mastodon account and see what’s going on over there. I was looking for Mastodon feeds for the news sources I follow but was unable to find any and it got me thinking that these companies are (so far) missing a huge opportunity.

Consider a media company such as the NY Times or Wall Street Journal. They use a subscription service model which to me seems perfect for Mastodon. They can publish a short summary as a tease with a link to the full article behind a paywall. People who are interested can follow these accounts and see the summary, and if they get interested they will get a subscription.

Well, that sounds like Twitter, so why should they switch to Mastodon? I’ve seen so many articles recently discussing how the federated nature of Mastodon seems to make things harder: you have to choose a server and how to sign up and why it’s a pain.

Unfortunately these articles don’t follow the logic to its conclusion and so they are missing the opportunities that federation gives. They are so focused on “you have to find some server that someone is running out of their basement” that they don’t take the next step and really grok what that means: it means that anyone can run a Mastodon server. And “anyone” means someone like… the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal!

Why aren’t these media companies creating their own Mastodon servers, such as mastodon.nytimes.com, and providing accounts to their reporters? This seems perfect: you are not beholden to a separate company like Twitter; you don’t have to worry about what kind of ads will pop up next to your posts; you don’t have to worry about someone pretending to be a NY Times reporter on Mastodon because any real NY Times reporter will have an account on the NY Times Mastodon server… and a fake one will not. No worries about moderation, etc. because only your employees are posting there and you have complete control over the content.

Now you have a verified communication chain directly to your readers, without having to create something on the scale of Twitter… through the power of federation. And best of all, it is not at all hard to create and manage a Mastodon server. The web services folks at these large companies could do it over their lunch break.

For reporters who don’t work directly for the Times but still publish there, they can keep their own Mastodon account on a different server if they prefer while still getting that account verified using the NY Times website, with the link-back feature.

There can be different accounts such as @frontpage, @sports, etc. where articles are boosted to allow users to follow based on their interest.

So, what are you waiting for? When will we see all the NY Times, WaPo, Wall Street Journal, etc. bylines show not just a Twitter handle but also a Mastodon address, using the company’s local server?