Tech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon

What happens when innovation doesn’t fit the usual narratives?

Photo by Battenhall on Unsplash

Tech and business journalists know what to do with Twitter.

Twitter is a for-profit company with headquarters in California. It has a CEO. It has investors and revenues and a valuation. The purpose of the company is to make money for its investors by growing the user base as large as possible and extracting as much cash as possible from that user base, either through advertising or subscriptions. Though the product it delivers is different, Twitter is pretty much the same thing as Snapchat and Facebook and Netflix, and Google.

Twitter fits easily into the standard tech journalism templates, which include:

• “New, exciting tech company will revolutionize everything!”
• “Older, established tech company releases new product!”
• “Look how rich or weird this tech CEO is!”
• “Tech company acquires another tech company!”
• “Tech company is on the rise!”
• “Tech company is in decline!”
• And, when things go awry: “Tech founder faces criminal charges!”