An organization called Newsmast is introducing a new approach to decentralized social media with the release of an updated version of its Mastodon mobile app that combines content from two servers into one interface. This is a different approach than what Mastodon, the open source Twitter/X, does. Instead, it usually works. The idea is to give Mastodon users a way to connect, follow, and participate in topic-based timelines called communities, allowing them to better understand content scattered across the decentralized social web. .
With Newsmast's apps, organizations can solve the challenges faced by decentralized social networking communities: how to curate content to users and help them find what they're interested in. We aim to solve it.
He's not the only one thinking about this issue. For example, his Flipboard social magazine app has created a “desk”, a human-curated feed across science, technology, culture, news, and more for users to follow. Newsmast also credits the Mastodon app and Mozilla-backed startup Mammoth for its community inspiration. At Mammoth, Smart His Lists offers a similar feature, organizing topics and news sources of your interest into easy-to-access lists for others to follow.
Newsmast's approach is similar to these in that it curates a “community”, a feed of topics hosted on its own server, newsmast.social. Newsmast has created communities across larger categories such as Government & Politics, Business & Work, Science, Technology, Culture, Sports, and Lifestyle that users can choose to follow within the app. For example, the technology group includes communities such as AI, engineering, and programming, in addition to the broader technology community.
Image credits: Screenshot of news mast
Additionally, Newsmast provides a system where anyone can build their own Mastodon server by selecting their own hand-picked communities. Users will be able to connect to that server instead of Newsmast's server within the Newsmast app. For example, someone could create a server that focuses solely on art or AI, and then have a dedicated community within that server that users can follow and participate in.
This “plugin” server integrates additional content into the Newsmast app under the banner “My Communities”. Or he can scroll down and participate in only one community's content individually.
Like any other post, you can like, repost (boost), reply to, bookmark, follow, and add community content to lists.
Users who prefer the current Mastodon app, whether it's the official app or a third-party app like Mammoth or Ivory, can follow Newsmast's community feed instead of using the Newsmast app directly. Later this week, Newsmast will also open its API to developers. This means your favorite Mastodon app will be integrated with NewsMast's community for a more seamless experience.
Image credits: Screenshot of news mast
This plugin server architecture is an idea of how things work differently in the world of decentralized social media.
Typically, Mastodon users can join an instance (a server such as mastodon.social) and see the local server timeline and the federated timeline. This includes all public posts from users known to your instance. Still, this approach may have limitations when compared to centralized social media like Twitter/X, where all content available across the network is available in one place. Mastodon allows server owners to choose to block other servers, such as servers that host adult content or spam, or small servers that are not actively managed. Some server owners are debating blocking her Instagram thread if it becomes a linked app.
On the other hand, users with large servers often have difficulty keeping track of federated timelines that include different content and topics posted in different languages. Therefore, it often doesn't make sense to sift through this vast amount of information to find topics or people of interest.
Newsmast's plug-in servers with curated communities are designed to filter out NSFW content, but those that don't, or filter out bots, or only bots ( !!), you can also choose to build a server that only filters posts. You can use images or just let everything pass through without filtering anything.
“Community timelines contain rich, curated content so people can explore new topics, make connections, and join the conversation,” said Michael Foster, co-founder of Newsmast. said in an announcement shared with TechCrunch. “And the plugin architecture could become the platform for all kinds of professional Fediverse servers in the future.”
The communities it curates are created through postings and federation from other Newsmast users, not through scraping or aggregation. Unlike following hashtags, these communities also include elements such as following, filtering, and muting. (In fact, some Mastodon users were confused as to why Newsmast accounts were following them and promoting their content without understanding the larger purpose.)
Newsmast's app is supported by the Newsmast Foundation, a UK-based charity focused on building a new vision for social media. The company intends to build an ad-free, charity-powered Twitter-like service as an alternative to Elon Musk's “X” and “Mr. Meta” threads. The app had a soft launch last summer, but it took several more months to fully integrate with Mastodon.
Community is currently available on the Newsmast iOS and Android apps, and will soon be available as a desktop and progressive web app, the company said.