One of the reasons I was still going to Twitter was to see news that I cared about. Since we already had our Twitter toolbox creating the Mastodon Profile Builder and our Mastodon toolbox for verified.coop, we decided to create press.coop that would mirror popular press accounts to the fediverse.
You can see all the accounts being mirrored at press.coop/directory.
When we were putting the finishing touches on the service, Twitter announced that they would be changing the API usage terms. We decided to press on and had hoped that the terms would have been finalized by the time we were ready to launch so that we would have confidence we could continue to offer the service — but alas, when we were ready this past Monday — @TwitterDev once again delayed providing any details. We decided to ship anyway and are hopeful the new API terms will allow us to continue offering this free service.
As new members to the fediverse, we were uncertain how the community would respond. At the time of this writing, my original post was boosted 48 times and favorited 44 times. Clearly others were also missing the news.
@dickhardt yes!!!! Wow, that’s awesome. People here have been complaining about the lack of news accounts, here you go!
@laimis@mstdn.social
As we are only mirroring the birdsite posts to the fediverse and the accounts will not be interacting with their followers in the fediverse, we have disabled replies. We tag each post with #press hoping that will be useful, for example to view only the news.
If/when the mirrored accounts have an official presence somewhere other than press.coop, we will update the webfinger response to point there which will redirect all followers there — a great feature of the fediverse protocols!
In our discussions around this project, we wondered which accounts would be of the most interest. Below is a ranking of accounts by the current number of followers. These are comparably small numbers, but it is interesting to see what accounts the fediverse is currently interested in following.
While you can click through to see each profile on press.coop below, the easiest way to follow any of the accounts would be to view my post from your Mastodon app and then you can easily follow any of the accounts listed.
 | Reuters @Reuters | 50 |
 | The Associated Press @AP | 44 |
 | BBC Breaking News @BBCBreaking | 33 |
 | WIRED @WIRED | 31 |
 | The Washington Post @washingtonpost | 30 |
 | BBC News World @BBCWorld | 27 |
 | MIT Technology Review @techreview | 26 |
 | Bloomberg @business | 25 |
 | CNN @CNN | 25 |
 | MSNBC @MSNBC | 25 |
 | The New York Times @nytimes | 24 |
 | The Verge @verge | 22 |
 | CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk | 22 |
 | TechCrunch @TechCrunch | 21 |
 | Forbes @Forbes | 21 |
 | The Economist @TheEconomist | 20 |
 | The Guardian @guardian | 20 |
 | Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine | 19 |
 | The Wall Street Journal @WSJ | 18 |
 | TIME @TIME | 18 |
 | POLITICO @politico | 17 |
 | Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish | 16 |
 | BBC News UK @BBCNews | 16 |
 | CBC News @CBCNews | 16 |
 | Guardian news @guardiannews | 15 |
 | The Independent @Independent | 13 |
 | The Economist US @EconUS | 13 |
 | National Geographic @NatGeo | 13 |
 | Financial Times @FinancialTimes | 13 |
 | Financial Times @FT | 10 |
 | CNN International @cnni | 10 |
 | The Globe and Mail @globeandmail | 9 |
 | The Times and The Sunday @thetimes | 8 |
 | BBC Business @BBCBusiness | 7 |
 | CBC @CBC | 7 |
 | Bloomberg Markets @markets | 6 |
 | The Telegraph @Telegraph | 6 |
 | BBC Sport @BBCSport | 5 |
 | POLITICOEurope @POLITICOEurope | 4 |
 | CBC News: The National @CBCTheNational | 4 |
 | The Economist Data Team @ECONdailycharts | 3 |
 | Economist Intelligence @TheEIU | 2 |
 | Fox News @FoxNews | 2 |
 | The New Yorker @NewYorker | 1 |
 | The Atlantic @TheAtlantic | 1 |
 | Ars Technica @arstechnica | 1 |
 | IGN @IGN | 1 |
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