Medium, the online publishing platform founded by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, has announced that it is adopting the open-source Mastodon platform and launching its model to help its writers and publications. The firm has announced the creation of me.dm, a Mastodon community with dependable infrastructure, moderation, and a short domain name that will make it simpler for writers to publish their identities.
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Who Is Mastodon?
Mastodon has been around for six years, but it has lately gained popularity as people desert Elon Musk's Twitter. Despite a decrease in Twitter's moderation staff, Musk has made several contentious choices since owning the social network, including reenabling the accounts of white nationalists and former president Donald Trump and banning journalists. He's also been messing with Twitter's product, saying he'll de-verify free users and turning off advertising, which might spell trouble for the company.
Due to this, some Twitter users are looking for alternatives where they may continue sharing their ideas and participating in open discussions. One of the platforms that benefited greatly is Mastodon.
From a meager 300,000 in October 2022, the social microblogging network now has 2.5 million monthly active users. Due to its decentralized structure, however, the service can't be compared to Twitter. Instances are communities inside Mastodon that have rules, moderation procedures, and home timelines; users don't join Mastodon itself. Users may still choose to follow each other across communities. Still, most will likely join a community dedicated to a particular interest or hobby, such as technology, music, security, gaming, or a wide variety of other subjects.
The Medium-Mastodon Partnership
As an added benefit of becoming a Medium member, the firm will make the social networking service Mastodon available to the platform's authors and readers. The news will make for "interesting local feed," the business said.
With Medium's onboarding process for Mastodon, users will have an easier time discovering communities and conversations that are relevant to them.
Medium will develop a "sign up with Medium" interface for joining Mastodon as part of this endeavor, which may alleviate some user concerns regarding the complexity of Mastodon's onboarding process.
Despite the seeming contradiction, the longer-form blogging site Medium has adopted a framework optimized for considerably shorter content.
Why Is Medium Abandoning Twitter?
Indeed, if Twitter fell during the Musk period, it could hurt firms like Medium. So far, publishers have used Twitter to expand their fan bases, advertise their books, and foster dialogue with their audience. Sites like Medium may lose popularity if more authors and readers leave Twitter, particularly if the writer doesn't have a large following on any other social networking platform. Having a Mastodon community where these conversations may continue outside Twitter might be a solution to this issue.
Medium is one of many services that has concluded that it has to find a Twitter replacement. Substack, a newsletter publishing platform, has released a new feature called "discussions," which allows authors and readers to have brief in-app conversations. Last month, Flipboard introduced a Notes section for the same reason. And in November, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced that Tumblr would embrace ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking platform that drives Mastodon.
Since Medium already has over 100 million readers, creating a Mastodon instance may help increase its popularity. Many people may have joined the "fediverse," the collective name for the interconnected Mastodon servers if even a small fraction of them switched from Medium.
Featured image: Medium
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