Newsmast and news curation in the fediverse
Newsmast, a social network committed to thoughtful knowledge sharing and curated communities, has emerged as a notable project within the fediverse. It is backed by the UK Newsmast Foundation Charity, which has set itself as a mission to change social media for the better. I spoke with Michael Foster, co-founder of Newsmast, and Freddie Johnson, Foundation Ambassador for Newsmast.
The main way that Newsmast is working towards their mission is with curated communities. The idea came to the co-founders after he realised how during the Russian invasion of Ukraine an online community of valuable news and commentators emerged online. As this happened mainly on Twitter, the events of the last year necessitated the use of a different place to facilitate these trusted news communities, which they found in Mastodon and the fediverse.
Over the last year, the team has been busy building their own place on the fediverse. Starting with a fork of Mastodon, they have developed their own apps for Android and iOS, as well as their own web interface. The design puts communities at the core, as a way for people to help with discovery on the fediverse, and find valuable content.
Curated Communities
Newsmast has put quite a bit of work in their curated communities, and it goes beyond just providing a list of accounts to follow. There are communities in a large variety of topics, varying from ‘Government and Policy’ to ‘Biodiversity and Rewilding’, to ‘Ukraine invasion’, to ‘History’. A Newsmast community has some parallels with Bluesky’s custom feed. For creating each community, Newsmast takes a group of hashtags, then apply some strong filters to the posts made with this hashtag. Then it adds some specific hand-picked accounts to the subject as well that are knowledgeable in the field.
Freddie Johnson explains that they have structured the communities around academic or newspaper subjects, and that the focus is groups like academics, news organisations, and non-profit workers. They are thinking about how to provide editorial oversight over communities. The organisation is working on establishing a community based editorial board, that takes inspiration from the academic model for oversight boards.
A unique home on the fediverse
Another aspect about Newsmast that stands out is that it is also a hosted fediverse server that anyone can join. While there are many fediverse servers that are available for signup registration, there are not many servers that provide a clear governance structure in the way that Newsmast can. When new people first join the fediverse, the question of which server to join can be a difficult one, for multiple reasons: for people new to decentralised social networks it is often unclear what the question means, what the impact of the choice is. But the differences between the servers can be hard to find as well. Signing up asks you to trust the administrators of the server, with limited info of who they are. Newsmast stands out in a positive way; it presents a clear and extensive vision for what they want their social network to be, and also shows that the server is run by a UK accredited charity. For new people joining the fediverse, Newsmast provides an attractive option to join.
Expanding communities
Newsmast is working on making their curated content more broadly accessible. In the latest update of Mastodon app Mammoth, there are now curated “Smart Lists”, with the Environment and Nature Smart Lists curated by Newsmast. The organisation is also working on an update so you can log into Newsmast with your current Mastodon account, which should make it easier for people to access the Newsmast communities.
Different organisations are thinking about, and working on, curating and helping people discover interesting content. Flipboard is expanding their native integration with the fediverse for their magazines, Mammoth is providing Smart List, and for Bluesky is curated feeds one of their key features. Newsmast takes this concept and moves it further by actively thinking about how to provide oversight to the editorial power that the curators have. It is one of the more interesting projects in the fediverse that I have seen in quite a while, and certainly worth keeping an eye on. You can try Newsmast at newsmast.org.
https://fediversereport.com/newsmast-and-news-curation-in-the-fediverse/
