Mastodon Media List

This list is designed to point people to media outlets on the fediverse so they can either follow or avoid them. Suggestions for additions and corrections are welcome; hit me up at @epistemophagy@mastodon.lol.

See also the Mastodon Infobot List, which catalogues unofficial crossposting and feed-reading bots for news outlets and information sources of every kind.



Special thanks

I am very grateful to the following people for suggesting additions to this list:


Listing format

Title (Controller): @username@host.tld (source)

In this case, Controller means the entity with most or all editorial control of the publication. Usually that will be its owner (e.g., News Corp), but occasionally it will be a coordinating umbrella organisation of some other kind (e.g., PBS, States Newsroom).

source will be an inline link to documentary evidence that the account belongs to and is operated by the publication, as opposed to being, e.g., a feed-reader bot or a manually curated timeline controlled by an unconnected individual. However, in a world where media presence in the fediverse remains sparse, bots do have their uses; for a listing of bots, see the separate Media Bot List.

To improve at-a-glance transparency and clarity, the link text in source will be an abbreviation indicating the nature of the source. For an index of these abbreviations, see Source tags, below.

Locations given are either the area the publication serves, or, if it has no defined service area, where it’s legally based.


international

popular

academic


Regional

Australasia

Europe

North America


Australia

nationwide

Queensland

Austria

Canada

nationwide

Manitoba

Ontario

France

Germany

nationwide

popular

academic

Die ARD

Accounts in this list belong to entities affiliated with the Working Group of Public Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany (the ARD), the association of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters, who work together to provide public broadcasting at the federal level.

Baden-Württemberg

Bayern

Berlin

Bremen

Hessen

Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

Nordrhein-Westfalen

Sachsen

Greece

Hong Kong

Italy

Qaṭar

South Africa

Spain

nationwide

Andalucía

Sweden

Switzerland

Taiwan

United Kingdom

nationwide

popular

academic

England

Scotland

Wales

United States

nationwide

popular

academic

Arizona

Statewide

Tucson

California

Colorado

Florida

Indiana

Kansas

Kentucky

Maryland

Massachusetts

Minnesota

Mississippi

Nebraska

Oregon

Texas

Washington

(* — Satirical. We all need a little fun in our lives.)


Footnotes

1 — Despite the name, Broadcasting Scotland doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the Scottish Government.

Production notes

Source tags

These are short text strings indicating the nature of the authority asserting the account is associated with the publication. The ones currently in use are as follows, in roughly descending order of precedence:

OS — Official statement. The publication or an individual explicitly identified as actively speaking for it has confirmed that it owns the account. This might include:

  • a post on another platform from the publication’s known main account, linking to the Mastodon profile;
  • a link to the Mastodon profile on the publication’s official website.

SD — Shared domain. The account is on an instance with closed registrations which is on a domain known to be owned by the publication.

MV — Metadata verification. The account’s profile metadata links to a page on a domain known to be owned by the publication, and that page contains a correctly formatted link back, generating the visible “green check” verification indicator in the profile’s metadata section.

IV — Instance verification. The account is on an instance which has an administrative policy of verifying that accounts belong to their purported owners.

CS — Credible source. An entity or individual in a strong position to know has stated that the publication owns the account.

SF — Self follow. The account is followed by another division, edition, etc., of the same publication, which itself is authenticated in a way which ranks higher in this list.

OA — Own authority. The account asserts that it belongs to the publication, plausibly but without substantiating evidence.

Other notes

To enable smooth and internally consistent extension in future, HTML anchors for country and province headings are based on ISO 3166, with the following exception:

  • “int” for “International,” which does not appear in ISO 3166, but is the top-level domain (TLD) for “international”; TLDs are broadly ISO-3166-based.

For ease of use and respect, for administrative subdivisions below the national level in non-Anglophone countries, the name is given in the first instance preferably in the country’s official language, but otherwise in its most spoken language, and then English.