Ok US residents, incredibly unofficial poll time!
The Biden Administration is bringing back free COVID 19 home test kits available by mail. Did you hear about this from:
Obligatory link to order your tests:
I'm curious to know how well Mastodon works to spread news like this. I can remember the first time I understood the "value" of Twitter for breaking news was hearing about Michel Jackson's death. I was working at camp and someone came around telling us how she had heard it "on Twitter" back in 2009. My own Twitter usage only really started when I wanted to follow breaking free agency news in the NFL. Very curious to see if Mastodon can also disseminate new in a similar way.
@mcneely it feels hit or miss now for news to travel as quickly through Mastodon. If someone sharing breaking news includes a relevant hashtag, it’s very searchable. But, which hashtag? It relies on the original poster. Also, someone interested in a certain area would needed to have added that hashtag ad one they monitor. There’s a separate view of trending hashtags but it seems to lag a couple days.
@DanNess good point. Hashtags and trending would be the best bet for spreading big breaking news.
@mcneely and I just looked at hashtags currently trending, and near the top is #MajorAnnouncement. I'll let you read that yourself and judge its usefulness as breaking news you want to be urgently informed of.
@mcneely @DanNess news is dominated by various accounts I’m looking through the hashtags to figure things out, I’ve also collected a bunch of decent mirror bot accounts for news orgs and have posted some of them up and will be posting more on #FollowFriday s so people can create their own news lists on their accounts
@mcneely I wonder which hashtags people would use? #News is used so much it's almost too much. #BreakingNews isn't used that often, but too often has been coopted by someone selling something.