What to the hairy elephants think about this? At first glance I don’t see the need and it smells like corporate dredging to me…?
It just seems like activitypub being used the way it was intended to.
Also, this seems to be owned by a UK registered charity. So I’m not sure what exactly is meant by corporate dredging.
Have you ever followed a group account?
It’s basically that, but with what sounds like some functionality to make them easier to create and find for users of their app/server/API.
The couple I’ve seen boost my posts in the wild seemed more like bot accounts that just boosted what they saw in the hashtags I used, but it sounds like some of them are probably a bit more curated.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The idea is to offer Mastodon users a way to connect with, follow and join topic-based timelines, called Communities, that can help them make better sense of content scattered across the distributed social web.
With Newsmast’s app, the organization aims to solve a challenge that faces decentralized social networking communities — how best to curate the content and serve it to users so they can find things that interest them.
Social magazine app Flipboard, for example, created “desks” that are human-curated feeds across areas like Science, Tech, Culture and News for users to follow.
Newsmast has created communities across a number of larger categories, like Government & Politics, Business & Work, Science, Technology, Culture, Sports, Lifestyle and more, which users can opt to follow in its app.
“The community timelines bring a wealth of curated content, so people can explore new topics, make connections and join the conversation,” said Newsmast co-founder Michael Foster, in an announcement shared with TechCrunch.
The company intends to build a Twitter-like service using a charitable structure, that’s free from advertising, to offer an alternative to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads.
The original article contains 871 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
