“What are Community Feeds? Why has my post been boosted?”
-
“What are Community Feeds? Why has my post been boosted?”
You make a post, add a hashtag, and it’s immediately boosted by one of our Community Feeds - plus you get a notification. What’s going on?
We’re Newsmast and we’re all about knowledge sharing. We’ve built topical Communities, spaces that anyone can dip in and out of to get involved in the things they care about. Communities combine and curate posts from all over the Fediverse into an easy to access single source.
-
That’s why you’ll have seen us boosting your posts. You’ve probably used a hashtag our human curators think suits the conversations in a Community, or our curators have followed you from a Community because you're a leading voice posting regularly on a topic. Your post is then boosted into an organised space that people can see, if they choose to.
-
When you post with a hashtag, your post is pulled into a feed with all the other posts on that hashtag. What we do is keep it safe and on topic by adding extra layers of curation - all done by real people, not AI.
We add carefully researched accounts which post regularly on topic, but usually don’t use any hashtags. Finally, we cut out a lot of irrelevant content which comes through using filters and mutes. -
For every 10 hashtags we might bring together, we’ll often have 50 or more filters in place, and a lot of mutes. Our human moderators constantly update and edit these filters too, to stay on top of the conversations. If you want to join our volunteer moderation team, let us know!
The end result is timely, informative content - including your post.
So why all the boosts and notifications?
-
We wanted to make our communities accessible to everyone in the Fediverse, without the need to use a dedicated app. We’d love to have the ready-made ability to create Community Feeds, but Mastodon and the Fediverse don’t have the built in tools to do this. So, we’ve adapted existing technologies to make things work.
-
We’ve used customised accounts to create the communities, and automated accounts to boost them around the Fediverse so everyone can be a part of it. Unfortunately, notifications are a side effect which we can’t turn off due to the limits of Mastodon’s capability. The good news is that you can turn them off yourself. If you don’t want to follow a feed, and would like to stop seeing notifications: just mute the relevant Feed account. You’ll find them all at newsmast.community.
-
If you have any questions, want to know more, or simply want to remove your content from Community Feeds just let us know by private messaging us or emailing [email protected].
-
@newsmast Hi. I can understand knowledge sharing and so on. But there is an issue with this automated reposting. Why? Because some of the content shared by the people even publicly is still an copyrighted one material. And in that case you are obliged by the law letter to first asking for permission to use, reshare and such things. Without that agreement from the content owners, authors you're simply and ordinary stealing from them. And that's not funny at all. That already you did by me now.
-
Hi, boosting content is at the heart of the Fediverse and is essential to server connection. Our Community Feeds are a part of that.
We appreciate not everyone wants their content boosted, so feel free to block newsmast.community to stop the server being able to see your posts or, if your instance doesn't allow server-wide blocking, let us know and we'll action it from our end. Once you block or are suspended from a server all your content is removed.
-
Martina Neumayerreplied to Newsmast on last edited by
@newsmast You don't have to explain me something what obvious already is. It is not my business to block everyone here. But it is your and your only thing to pay attention for doing something fully legal. Legality is a priority in such case.
Perhaps you should check at first all the given informations on the profiles of the people you are taking content from?
On mine it is all openly mentioned according to status of my stuff. Copyrighted, registered and trademarked. So.. it is clear isn't it? -
Newsmastreplied to Martina Neumayer on last edited by
Hi, we'll suspend your account on our end to prevent your posts being picked up by Community Feeds.
Hope this helps!
-
@newsmast hello, this is my new account of a small independent news site publishing only original contents: @Altrenotizie
Hope for some boost from your feeds, but the posts are not reposted even if I duly add various #.
Can you explain why? Is there a way you can fix it?
That would be of great help.
Thanks a lot -
Hi, have you encountered this issue recently? We've noticed some delay on the Feeds the past few days so this may be the issue.
-
@newsmast yes, today. Your advice to wait some time?
-
Hi. Yes, please wait some time.
Sometimes the servers get a bit clogged up but hopefully they'll be running smoothly again soon.
If you're still seeing issues in a day or two please let us know! You can email [email protected]
-
@newsmast This is opt-out instead of opt-in? Gross. Please remove me and any of my content from your system.
-
Thanks for getting in touch. Your account has been suspended from the server.
Hope this helps!
-
Please remove me and any of my content from your system.
-
Hi, you have now been suspended by the newsmast.community instance so your content will no longer appear there and will be deleted.
Hope that helps!