DRAFT
We have a real problem in Fediverse journalism: almost all linking flows upwards – to established sources and wannabe establishment voices, while there is a strong aversion to linking horizontally (to peers) or downwards (to smaller and emerging voices).
This behaviour isn’t native to the #openweb. It’s inherited from mainstream media culture, where authority, visibility, and trust are assumed to come from the top. In that model, linking becomes a form of validation, and people are cautious about offering that validation outside established hierarchies.
But this creates a real bottleneck by limiting discovery, reinforces existing power structures, and prevents the kind of rich, networked understanding that the Fediverse should enable. If we want a genuinely decentralised and trustworthy news/media ecosystem, we need to shift this pattern. Linking should reflect context, relevance, and trust, not just perceived status.
That means actively encouraging:
- Horizontal linking between peers and communities
- Downward linking to new, local, and less visible sources
- Clear pathways to trace stories across the network, not just back to “authoritative” nodes
The challenge is cultural more than technical. This “linking upwards only” habit comes from fear – fear of losing credibility, of amplifying something unreliable, of stepping outside accepted narratives.
So the task isn’t to attack or block this behaviour, but to compost it – to transform it into something more useful. We do that by:
- Making trust visible and contextual, rather than assumed
- Supporting practices that reward good linking in all directions
- Building tools that make it easy to follow and verify flows across networks
In short, we need to move from hierarchical validation to networked understanding. That’s how we make Fediverse journalism more truly native to the #openweb.
PS. I did not add any links as at this first step its judgmental and thus distracting.
