Reconsidering Longform

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Emerging Themes: Who wants to federate a full article?

Posted on by Brendan & Roel

Based on our conversations with media professionals we identify a key issue: publishers likely won’t want to federate full articles, instead they want to redirect traffic back to their sites. This is the case both for publishers that make use of paywalls and those that don’t. It is also the case for publishers whose content is freely distributed under creative commons licenses and those that retain full copyright.

An important context here is that all publishers we spoke to found it important to have a presence on non-commercial social media. It spoke to and reinforced their values. It offered them independence. They saw it as a way to have access to their subscribers in a way which is not contingent on third parties. They did not need to be convinced why something like the fediverse was a good idea. Instead, when it comes to the fediverse as a distribution channel, they have particular needs.

Why do publishers want readers on their own site?


Formatting and layout
Publishers spend a great deal of effort to make sure their articles look good and read well. They make frequent use of illustrations, pull quotes, sub-headings and other formatting to break up the flow of text.

Those publishers whose online outlet mirrors material also published in print expressed a desire to maintain the same quality of design. Therefore, they invested heavily in custom(ized) CMS’ that can for instance flow text around images, or display multiple images as carousels or slideshows. In some cases such CMS support interactive elements such as information visualizations where readers can explore the data. Furthermore, published articles appear as part of series or with links to other articles in the archive and these can be indicated visually.

Publishers also feature image-only publications such as comics or photo reports. Especially where those include series of images, editorial control over placement is also important. Finally when it comes to photo reports, captions are an important element.

Funding
All publishers require income to operate. Although we spoke to publishers with very distinct business models, all saw their own website, and directing traffic to it, as a fundamental reason to use social media. The most obvious cases are those where the business model revolves around subscriptions, paywalls and advertising. However, publishers who offer their materials for free and who benefit from wide circulation of their material also expressed doubts. For instance, many rely on calls to become a member or to donate in the context around a piece of content. Only federating that content means it gets detached from such a fundraising context.

Control
Redirecting readers to their own platform ultimately is a way to redirect readers to a place the publisher can influence. That has different aspects. In terms of content moderation publishers wanted to for instance control comments on posts. Either to disable them altogether or to remove harassment. They can do so on their own sites, but will they be able to on federated long-form articles? Corollary to that is that some publishers mentioned the desire to know or influence the context in which the full article is displayed.

Another aspect is that it is on the publisher’s own sites that they can get fine-grained insights in to which articles are read, where they are circulating and where readers come from. Such insights are based on analytics suites on the site, or in front of the site. Metrics, such as impressions, are available on commercial social media but not on the fediverse.

What about Starlight Princess?

Starlight Princess adalah slot video bertema fantasi anime yang dikembangkan oleh Pragmatic Play, provider ternama di industri iGaming. Sejak diluncurkan, game ini cepat menjadi favorit para pemain berkat tampilan visualnya yang memukau, gameplay yang menghibur, dan potensi kemenangan besar hingga 15.000x taruhan. Games ini dapat anda temukan di Situs Slot Resmi Taurus77 yang telah dipercaya dan bersertifikat resmi PAGCOR.1

The above quote is pulled from a WriteFreely instance. It is either SEO spam, advertisement for online casinos, or both. Such content also gives you an idea who would actually like to federate full articles: Starlight Princess would. Yet this is not isolated example. Long-form spam can be trivially found on many WriteFreely, Plume and WordPress sites2. Together with Ghost, these applications make up the current ecology of long-form content applications in the fediverse.

The current design of many fediverse servers means that remote content is cached, viewable and searchable on different instances. That is a spammer’s paradise3. All the more so with the increasing availability of LLMs to generate images and text. The fact that the long-form spam is still contained to a few platforms may be more to luck than foresight. It is also a context that anyone implementing Article support should keep in mind.

How could long-form federation meet publishers’ needs?

Our interviewees did however indicate their interest in federating full articles under some conditions. We list some of the different things we’ve heard:

Those outlets who already adapted their content to web publishing4 saw possibility for federating full articles. That means that it is likely more suited for (certain forms of) blogging and newsletters, as it addresses concerns around formatting and layout. If you already have a newsletter, why not add another publishing channel?

Distributing articles to paying subscribers would be an option several respondents expressed interest in5. Ultimately the main goal of the metrics that publishers employed is to know their reach is. Metrics are also one of the big reasons publishers want readers on their own site. These metrics are used as educated guesses how clicks can convert in to revenue. Tying federation to revenue addresses those funding concerns and potentially removes the need for metrics.

Aggregate metrics could make it easier to know and prove to colleagues and decision-makers that investing in this ecosystem is the right decision and would therefore make the ecosystem more interesting to publish in.

Reply controls and moderation capabilities on federated long-form content respond to publishers need for influencing or controlling the context their materials are published in or circulated in.

However, some of these conditions require additional functionality which either does not yet exist in the fediverse (aggregate metrics, paid-followers) or is not widespread (reply controls).

Conclusion

Based on our findings the fundamental question for designers and developers of long-form support in fediverse apps is: How to deal simultaneously with both Starlight Princess and the fact that most publishers want to refer traffic back to their own site? Resolving this question is a determinant of the utility of such a feature. A more widespread implementation of long-form article support risks exacerbating long form spam. At the same time, without thoughtful design of long-form support, the fediverse risks satisfying none of publishers’ needs to funnel traffic back to their own sites: formatting, support of revenue models and control over content and context. It leads to a situation where the interesting material you want to read is not available but spam is all the more so. We think Article Previews (forthcoming) could be an interim approach.

  1. “Starlight Princess is an anime fantasy-themed video slot developed by Pragmatic Play, a leading provider in the iGaming industry. Since its launch, the game has quickly become a player favorite thanks to its stunning visuals, entertaining gameplay, and massive win potential of up to 15,000x the stake. You can find this game on the trusted and PAGCOR-certified official Taurus77 slot site”. Machine translated from Indonesian. This is spam that we reproduce for illustrative purposes. The Original is at @taurus77 @retrogarde.de ↩︎
  2. For Plume have a look at the flagship instance. Statistics aggregators give a good impression of what such spam might look like. Consider the sites in the section “Top 20 instances of increasing post counts” for WordPress or WriteFreely. ↩︎
  3. What makes the federated environment attractive is that a single link to a site can appear to be posted on many different domains, increasing its value for SEO. Furthermore, many instances have open or lax registration requirements. Anyone that has used WordPress will have experienced that its a prime target for automated comment spam. We ask what happens when those WordPress sites start to federate in large numbers? ↩︎
  4. As one interviewee described it: “You know, a cover photo and 600 or 700 words […] the standard written article on the web as it has been forever”. ↩︎
  5. Here the paid-subscriber RSS feed by 404 media is relevant prior art. It would however entail that people will not end up following publication@outlet.tld but rather subscriberUUID@outlet.tld and currently none of the systems work in this way. ↩︎