Importing the Press to the Fediverse

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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