The Verge as a #Mastodon instance
Last Friday the podcast Vergecast half-joked that readers of tech news site The Verge wanted a #mastodon instance, and said they'd hear out the developer who would turn the entire website into a Mastodon instance.
Turns out @zemlanin is that developer, and he released theverge.space yesterday. You can follow @theverge@theverge.space or follow individual writers to have the new posts from The Verge show up in your main timeline.
You can find his announcement here, as well as a short clip of the relevant part of the podcast.
What makes this project so interesting, is how this interacts with the design philosophy of The Verge. During a website redesign last year, The Verge added a storystream newsfeed. Its easy to understand when you visit the website, but this can basically be seen as a private news feed where The Verge writers link to interesting articles on other websites.
The goal here is to have people come to theverge.com instead of Twitter to get regular updates on what is happening today. Even if you're not interested in the latest laptop review you can still get links to other technews that happened today on other parts of the internet. To quote: “The internet is about conversations, and The Verge should be a place to find great conversations.”
Editor-in-chief Nilay Patel is clear about why the storystream was made: “our competition is not Wired, our competition is Twitter ... and other aggregators of audience”. Why are aggregators competition, and not other tech sites?
Publisher Helen Havlak has again the clear answer: “One of the most valuable assets we have at The Verge is a direct relationship to our audience who comes to our homepage. If I can just get people to the last point to refresh our site one more time a day, that is a huge lift to my business.”
The Verge wants to be in direct contact with their audience on their website. Aggregators take that direct contact away. By showing the content directly on the feed of the aggregator, they keep the audience of The Verge on their own aggregator platform instead.
So now take a look what’s happened here. Below is a screenshot of my Mastodon timeline, it shows a post by Elizabeth Lapotto. It is a post that is originally made in the storystream, not as a full article.
Here is how this looks on the homepage of theverge.com:
Barring some layout difference (and me being inconsistent on dark/light mode), these are functionally the same.
“Well duh, obviously they are the same”, you might say, “its effectively an RSS feed!”, and you would be totally right. Its just an RSS feed dropped into Mastodon, why does this matter?
Well, this matters, because Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, just told us that aggregators of audience are the competitors of The Verge! Mastodon is an aggregator of audience! Not only that, the “huge lift” to the business of The Verge is based on the idea that you’d visit the home page more often. And now, one of the ways that The Verge uses to drive traffic to their website directly integrates with Mastodon, their competitor. No need to visit the website anymore for the storystream, its right here, right in my feed.
Ofcourse, its easy to shrug Mastodon as a competitor, if only already on audience size. As a daily visitor to The Verge, and avid listener to the Vergecast for many years, it does not feel like there is any clash or competition here. Don’t see this as a hot take to whip up controversy. Originally I was just planning to shortly write up the website that was created after a fun clip on a podcast, and provide a little bit of context to the storystream that theverge.com has. But during research it just stuck out to me of how explicit the wording is for the design of theverge.com, and how much that clashes with this project.
What to make of this? By itself not much, theverge.space is by itself not a big deal. But it is part of a broader conversation and interaction of how the web is trying to reinvent itself. Different groups have different ideas on how conceptualize the newsfeed, and how to move beyond Twitter. For The Verge it’s a private, curated and topical feed; for Mastodon it is a fully open and decentralized feed. Now these different ideas have met and are interacting for the first time. It will be interesting to see how this develops further.
Thank you for reading! The Fediverse Report is keeping a close watch on the rapid developments within the fediverse. For more, you can subscribe, either directly to this blog via @fediverse-report@write.as or by following my Mastodon account. Every week you get the ‘Last Week in the fediverse’, with a summary of all the relevant news that has happened last week, as well as regular other drops of content.