So I’ve been thinking about the whole PSKY winning the bid for WBD situation, plus a ton of other US News sites being owned and controlled by MAGA — and now that PSKY owns massive legacy brands like CNN and platforms like TikTok, it got me wondering:
What would it look like if the Fediverse built its own large-scale news station?
And I don’t mean news apps (I know things like Flipboard already exist and are experimenting with federation). I mean:
A full-on journalism operation that is:
Fediverse-first
Hosted via PeerTube, Loops, its own website, etc.
Producing regular news broadcasts, investigative journalism, live streams, analysis panels, documentaries, etc.
Two Possible Models
- Professional Model (CNN-style equivalent)
A structured newsroom:
Editors, reporters, correspondents
Daily live broadcasts via PeerTube
Clip distribution via Loops
Federation across Mastodon/Lemmy/Pixelfed
Transparent funding (co-op model? public donations? instance-backed?)
Essentially: a decentralized alternative to cable news, but not algorithm-driven or corporate-owned.
- Amateur / Grassroots Model
Think:
Independent PeerTubers collaborating
Loop creators reporting locally
Lemmy communities functioning as distributed editorial desks
Citizen journalism amplified through federation
This could look more like a decentralized wire service, where stories propagate organically across instances.
Alternative Idea: Federated News Aggregator
Instead of building from scratch, what if the Fediverse collaborated with existing independent outlets like:
World Socialist Web Site
Communist.red
Mother Jones
The Nation
Common Dreams
The Intercept
Jacobin
(And many others.)
Podcasts:
The Deprogram:
https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/The_Deprogram
Revolutionary Left Radio:
Guerrilla History:
https://guerrillahistory.libsyn.com/
etc
YouTubers:
https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Hakim
Second Thought:
https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Second_Thought
YUGOPNIK:
https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YUGOPNIK
r/TankieTheDeprogram
https://www.reddit.com/r/TankieTheDeprogram/s/mJqfxpGOYK
r/TheDeprogarm
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogarm/s/Re7CYFSaSW
Maybe:
A federated aggregator
A shared ActivityPub-based publishing layer
A “news hub” instance that boosts and categorizes content
Or something similar to the federated streaming marketplace idea I suggested before — but for journalism instead of an Amazon Prime alternative
https://lemmy.world/post/40697282
Big Questions
Would a Fediverse news network increase credibility — or fragment it?
How would editorial standards work in a decentralized ecosystem?
Could co-op funding sustain professional reporting?
Would mainstream journalists ever migrate?
Should this aim to compete with centralized media — or complement it?
Also: would this risk becoming ideologically siloed? Or would federation naturally diversify perspectives?
Curious what everyone thinks.
Is this unrealistic? Inevitable? Already quietly happening?
Link to same post, but on Reddit:
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Lots of good ideas in here. A lot of this could be done with a lemmy community (possibly with mod-post only turned on), appointing reporters / writers as moderators, posting peertube links for videos, using pinned threads for bigger stories, etc.
Get rid of the Dem party influence too
I think 404 Media publishes on Ghost which uses activitypub.
Apparently there is also We Distribute, we’re basically a Fediverse news blog. Connected Places also does a lot of Fediverse / Bluesky reporting.
Interesting.
- https://ghost.org/alternatives/
- https://lemmy.ml/u/feed@404media.co
- https://lemmy.ml/u/404mediaco@mastodon.social
- https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
You can’t follow users on Lemmy, only communities (ActivityPub “groups”), so this wouldn’t work well in the threadiverse without tweaks on Lemmy’s side and/or Ghost’s side. I don’t see a ticket for groups support for Ghost, though there is a “low priority” one for Mastodon.Edit to add: WordPress is another possibility through their ActivityPub plugin, but AFAIK it doesn’t support communities/groups, either.
Edit again to add: 404’s premium/paywalled articles don’t seem to get published to their @feed@404media.co user account, but they do to their @404mediaco@mastodon.social user account. Not the entire article mind you, just a summary and an external link.
If the proposal is to avoid MAGA, do note ActivityPub is an open protocol, so anyone can join the network.
Also iirc BBC has a Mastodon instance, though I didn’t check further. And there are a few journalism-oriented Peertube channels, though most I could find are related to technology.
Also found out recently Gazeta do Povo (Brazilian news media) made a Bluesky account. Bluesky is kinda far when talking about “fediverse”, but I guess it counts since AT Protocol is a form of content federation?
If the proposal is to avoid MAGA, do note ActivityPub is an open protocol, so anyone can join the network.
Anyone can be booted off the network as well, either by banning them individually or by instance.
You literally can’t boot them off the network. All you can do is isolate them on an instance-by-instance basis.
I don’t know if you haven’t realized this, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear have been defederated by pretty much every other instance except for Lemmy.ml, and they’re still kicking.
Hell the only reason Lemmy.ml isn’t more widely defederated is because it’s the devs’ test instance
I don’t know if you haven’t realized this, but Lemmygrad and Hexbear have been defederated by pretty much every other instance except for Lemmy.ml, and they’re still kicking.
I’m very aware. It hardly matters that fascists will run their own Nazi bar instances, because even if we could prevent it, they’d just use some other online social platform. It’s not a problem that can or need be solved.
It would have a lot of beans
Could be the title of the news. “TheBeans”
Only if its our version of The Onion
Just FYI you probably want Majority Report and Jacobin out of that list. They are imperialist Liberals.
Sure would be neat, but it always comes down to funding.
Ads? No thanks, I’m here bcause the fediverse is not doing that.
… and content.
Can you be super fast and exclusive and sell that? not really, all the super fast stuff is delivered by random people who witness things, or press releases that are piped directly into the feed anyway.
Can you be super high quality and sell that? That’s just a regular website and people haven’t believed in “it’s a website, it’ll make money for sure”, since 1999
Sure would be neat, but it always comes down to funding.
Some publishers do it for free or rely solely on donations. It’s hard for me to imagine a payment system—never mind a paywall system—being built into a fediverse platform. Donations would probably have to be out-of-band, through existing platforms like Ko-fi & Liberapay.
There’s also apparently Crowdbucks
Yeah there are many of them. Patreon is big, but I’ve heard nothing but bad things about it from donees.
I think that CB is attempting to become a wrapper for all of them.
Ie you could use CB to pay using crypto, or Stripe, Apple/Google Pay, SAMSUNG Wallet, or etc
Oh. Hosting videos is very expensive, so if anything needs a solution, it’s PeerTube.
Don’t forget about Loops
Existing independent organisations is probably the only realistic one of these. Creating an actually competent news agency build from scratch takes a lot of work resources, making it dependent on the fediverse seems like an arbitrary limitation.
But freelancers and existing networks starting to work with the fediverse because our ideals match, that could definitely happen.
I like the concept. I don’t know how it would work in practice.
I think it would ultimately end up fragmented, especially when funding gets involved.
Who makes the decision for what gets funded? What is that decision process?
I think there will be space for a community funded news non-profit, but also I think NPR is already primed to fill that void.
I think an aggregated approach is more “Fediverse” like. But once again, who decides what does/doesn’t get published?
I think if those decisions and how they’re made are transparent, that would increase credibility, but it would end up being silo’ed because people like to read/watch things that they already agree with.
As I said earlier, I think PBS & NPR are primed to take on this kind of role. Personally I would love some more non-profit news reporting organizations.
I think an aggregated approach is more “Fediverse” like. But once again, who decides what does/ doesn’t get published?
What I was thinking was something similar to how Lemmy operates.
You just take the already existing websites / platforms, use some code to connect them to together, and let users create their own apps
Basically just take Lemmy, but replace the instances with News Websites
If a website gets too egregious, then the others could potentially vote to have their access revoked
Why do you need a fediverse for this? The issue with the media isn’t where to host things, it’s how to pay your writers.
