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…?
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.
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.
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!
