Author: Brendan & Roel

As the title suggests, we are interested in getting a better understanding of the possibilities for long-form publishing on the Fediverse. We think there is a lot of potential here, but we also think long-form content has not seen enough consideration as such.

What is long-form content?

We’ll say it upfront: long-form content is a bit of a vague, generic term that we’re using to describe a variety of things. We’re keeping it open on purpose, for now. Our working understanding, at this point, is that long-form content can be many different things: blog posts, illustrated articles as might appear in magazines, newspapers or purely-online news sites, “long-reads”, essays, rants, newsletters, or academic publications.

Long-form content often combines text and other media. Long-form content is longer than a tweet/toot, but shorter than a book.

In more technical, Fediverse-related terms, long-form content is what might be represented as an Article in the ActivityStreams Vocabulary.

What are we interested in?

We stared this inquiry with this question: Why should we follow the social media account of a public news organization which posts links to articles on the public news organization’s website when we could follow the public news organization’s website directly and read their articles in Mastodon?

This query opens out to other questions: is it just because mainstream social media do not allow for such functionality, or are there other reasons behind this? Does a publisher, like a public news organization, actually benefit from such a model or is it more important to link back to their own site? Actually, how do publishers understand and measure reach and impact of their long-form content more generally? But also, how do long-form publishers actually publish?

We’ve used a public news organization here as a stand-in. But in order to understand what the role of long-form content in the Fediverse ecology could be, we are interested in the perspective of writers and publishers more generally. “Publishers and writers” here should be understood in the broadest sense, that is, people who might have an interest in using the Fediverse to disseminate and announce their written works.

Another way of putting it, is that this project is about getting a more fine-grained understanding of what it is that separates a Note from an Article. We intuit that the difference between the two is about more than a difference in length and the inclusion of markup and media. It is about the different contexts of culture, economy and use that both forms of media inhabit and about the tensions that might exist between those two forms.

For instance, an article can be authored by several people. At the same time, current designs in alternative social media tend to assume a “one entry one author”. This runs contrary to existing practices where, aside from authors, editors and others contribute also contribute to the production of long-form content. Another tension is the one around revenue models and benefits that we already hinted at. Would publishers actually benefit from such a system? A further issue is that the Fediverse has built-in assumptions that all data is public. But some publishers rely on funding models models such as paywalls or subscriber-only content.

From the context of such (supposed) tensions, we have several other questions: What forms of displaying, disseminating and discovering long-form content make sense? What does long-form content typically look like and what challenges and opportunities does that represent? What functionalities do long-form publishers need and look for when publishing their material? 

Having a more fine-grained understanding of the contexts under which long-form content is produced, evaluated and disseminated allows us and others to design for those contexts better. Ultimately, we hope that benefits independent media outlets and the Fediverse more generally.

How will we find out?

Or, what is our research design? We plan for three steps: 

First, we want to understand the practices of professionals such as journalists or social media teams currently active on the Fediverse with regards to long-form publishing. What do these professionals use social media for? In particular we want to learn about how their use of social media relates to their publishing workflows: how are articles drafted and published, how are they revised, who publishes these articles and as who/what? What are measures for “success” and how are or can these be represented in the Fediverse? What do publishing strategies for publishing Fediverse-first, but not Fediverse exclusive, currently look like? What gaps are there between what the status quo of the Fediverse ecology offers and what practitioners want and need?

We will conduct semi-structured interviews with relevant practitioners to gain insights on these questions. Is that you? We would love to talk!

Simultaneously, we want to better understand the current state of the art of long-form publishing on the Fediverse. At the start of this post we said that long-form content has not seen enough consideration as such. That was not completely fair, and more of a way to get you reading up to this point ; ) In fact, there is plenty of stuff happening in this space that we are excited about and want to learn more from. Whether that is existing, albeit rudimentary, support for multiple media types in Mastodon forks or plugins that turn existing long-form platforms in to parts of the fediverse ecology, a lot is happening that we want to learn more about.

In other words, we want to find out what applications are already under development and in use, and, how their functionality works. We will learn more about that by trying out and studying those applications, for instance by dogfooding this blog. And, where possible, we hope to speak to developers and protocol designers to get a sense where the state of the art is and what the development community is thinking about. Again, is that you? We would love to talk!

Second, we will make small prototypes that either explore new possibilities, ask new questions or solve specific issues. These will be informed by the findings in the first step so we intentionally remain vague at this point. However, we will guide our prototyping by existing work and initiatives in this space as we aim for our efforts to be pragmatic and contributing to those already working on this topic. Having said that, and, us being us, we probably also want to try one or two out of left field things.

Third, we will be to revise the most promising of those prototypes of the second step based on input from the interlocutors of the first step. We will then consider a relevant form of publishing those prototypes. That could be a design mock-up, a contribution to emerging standards and specifications, a report or a series of blog entries. We’ll cross that bridge when we know more about where this research takes us.

So, who are we?

Brendan Howell (he/him) is an artist and a reluctant engineer currently doing research as a “Reinvent Social Platforms” Fellow at the Media-Lab Bayern / SWR X Lab. He is very into tools, plants, cargo bikes and discourse systems. He lives in Berlin, Germany but can often be found walking in wooded areas of Northern Europe or enjoying pastoral life in Hacksneck, Virginia, USA or Kvam, Norway with his extended family. You can find him on post.lurk.org.

Roel Roscam Abbing (he/him) is a practice-based researcher in arts and design. He is interested in sociotechnical systems, DIY, self-organization and alternative technological trajectories. Currently he is a doctoral student in Interaction Design at Malmö University where he is researching the configuration of on-line federation in alternative social media. You can find him on post.lurk.org.

Both Brendan and Roel have been involved in the Fediverse for quite a while and are co-hosting an instance as part of lurk.org.

Support

This research was supported, in part, by the Reinvent Social Platforms Fellowship of SWR X Lab and Media Lab Bayern

What is next?

We will keep this blog to post updates as we develop and refine our research project over time. As they say, like and subscribe if you want to follow along.