Technology
Twitter/X alternative Mastodon is addressing journalists with a new ‘byline’ feature
Mastodon, the open source, decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is unroll a new feature aimed at making the app more attractive to those who use it to keep up to date with news and information from writers and journalists. Starting Tuesday, the company will add clickable author bylines to link posts that can direct Mastodon users to the author’s account on the Fediverse, if active, helping journalists gain exposure and grow their following.
The new bylines go beyond the typical @username references that often accompany link posts from news publications and point to other written content, such as a WordPress blog or Substack. Instead, the change will include the news publication’s headline and image, followed by another reference below it with the author’s profile photo and name.
The feature is already rolling out to select news publishers including The Verge, MacStories and MacRumors. (It’s also in the queue here at JS, we’re told!)
To access these new bylines, you will need to use Mastodon’s main server at mastodon.social for now on the web or in an official mobile app. If you are using a different Mastodon server, it must support the recent Mastodon nightly release, but the feature only works for moderator-approved websites.
The company says the new bylines will also be supported by its API, allowing third-party apps to support the addition in the future.
On the back end, the innovation powering the feature is a new kind of OpenGraph tag, Mastodon says. These are the same kind of tags you would have on your website and help determine what kind of thumbnail image appears next to the page preview when shared with other services, such as Mastodon, iMessage, Discord, and more.
This tag looks like this: ‘
The handle in the tag can also refer to any Fediverse account, not just Mastodon. That means it can point to accounts on Flipboard, Threads, WordPress (with the ActivityPub plugin installed), PeerTube, Pixelfed, and others. Plus, it works without the leading at sign (@) for the handle, Mastodon says.
One caveat, however, is that it doesn’t yet support multiple authors for co-byline situations; only the first author will appear. But that could be addressed in a future release.
Mastodon says it will propose a specification draft for other ActivityPub platforms in the coming weeks.
The addition of the tag could potentially encourage more journalists to increase their use of the federated social network as it will help them gain exposure. The federation does have that 10+ million users, not counting Threads (which has 170 million monthly users but is not fully federated). Mastodon in particular has one 804,000 monthly actives.
