This is appears to be dark pattern marketing at play; they run a Mastodon instance which intercepts all links to the federated content and pushes you towards their for-profit site; it was actually not doing this earlier, when I visited a few links I actually got real mastodon content pages inconsistently.
Generally, if you visit anything like flipboard.social/@AlaskaBeacon it redirects you to to flipboard.com/@AlaskaBeacon which is entirely their for-profit presence. But then it doesn’t a few tries later after testing more - I watched within a minute the Texas BBQ one allow me to see the profile on flipboard.social, I reloaded and was suddenly redirected to their flipboard.com/TexasBBQ site.
It seems you might be able to load them into your own mastodon instance manually and it will work (I do see a profile page with legacy posts which hadn’t federated yet, so “no posts” at this early of a test). Something like myserver.social/@AlaskaBeacon will presumably work; I suspect though that all posts will be stubs that drive you towards flipboard.com to read the actual content, rather than a direct source (time will tell).
edit: s/is/appears to be/ to give benefit of the doubt
Mastodon is adding a feature that will tag links with Fediverse ids. So if I post an article link, and the news site has the special meta tag, the. The journalist’s Fediverse is will be linked below the article’s embed in my post.
This is probably an effort to help journalists find their audience on independent social media, which would help the whole ecosystem.
I have many friends who won’t get off Twitter becauee they follow journalists and subject-domain experts and are addicted to realtime, breaking news.
If large news-gathering organizations mandate their news staff to have presence elsewhere, or provide tools to let them simultaneously post and engage in other places, that will go a long way toward breaking the bottleneck.
Neat, I forgot all about Flipboard. Glad to see someone pushing for more local news reporting, giant corporate takeovers have really hurt independent reporting on all levels but especially at the local level.
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