15 ms·

The BBC on Mastodon

• system16 3y ago
  Nice to see a presence, but half a dozen accounts and not one that focuses on major news headlines? Aa it stands the unofficial bot that reposts from the Twitter account will still get more interaction from me.
  • riffic 3y ago
    I'd love to see these orgs put AP in their CMS. they could do things like @politics@bbc.uk, @sports, @finance, @entertainment, @breakingnews, etc, all on their own namespace they control.
    • jeroenhd 3y ago
      They could go even granular if they use their .bbc TLD. tennis@sports.bbc, italy@foreignaffairs.bbc, you name it. They can implement combination feeds by making sports@news.bbc boost all the individual categories, so people can easily find the specific types of news they're interested in. In the end I think they'll keep down the variety, sticking to a Twitter like experience.
• atchoo 3y ago
  Hmm. My faith in the BBC's commitment to decentralisation and open standards has been damaged by the artificial month delay they added to their podcast feeds to try and drive traffic to their centralised Sounds app. I've been listening to the In Our Time podcast for 20 years and then they go and vandalise it as a growth hack. There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date... which is just weird.
  • petepete 3y ago
    While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.
    • roywiggins 3y ago
      In recent weeks they've started inserting interstitial ads for other BBC content at random points inside In Our Time. "How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.
      • mdaniel 3y ago
        I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that a lot of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to just block them and the player skips over it My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream
    • atchoo 3y ago
      For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen. It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • Zhyl 3y ago
    I have get_iplayer [0] set up to download the topical comedy as it comes out and put it into a Podcast addict virtual podcast folder. Suits my needs. I would use Sounds, but the UI is actually really fiddly to get to where I need to go, you can "subscribe" but you can't have playlists or queues. It's just a bit rubbish all round. [0] https://get-iplayer.github.io/get_iplayer/ https://get-iplayer.github.io/get_iplayer/
    • roywiggins 3y ago
      I ended up rube-goldberging get_iplayer outputs into a proper podcast feed and thence into Pocket Casts with the rest of my podcasts. It sort of mostly works.
  • noneeeed 3y ago
    I feel like BBC Sounds is some senior manager's vanity project that they have staked their career on. Their obsession with trying to get me to use it instead of normal RSS feeds or third party radio services like TuneIn is incredibly frustrating. They have intentionally broken the experience for smart speaker users and podcast listeners because they are incapable of enticing them over with a better experience. The obsession with control has soured my feelings towards BBC radio.
    • hadrien01 3y ago
      I feel the same about Radio France (the radio public broadcaster here in France, equivalent to BBC Radio + BBC Sounds). They've been pushing their app more and more, and now RSS feeds correctly list the episodes, but if you try to download one from a few months ago you just get an ad to download the app. No thanks.
      • zerkten 3y ago
        Does Radio France generate revenues in other French-speaking countries with the same content? It feels like the BBC is trying to maximise revenue but expectations for consumers locally and overseas are going to be very different. Blocking loopholes hurts the local users more.
        • hadrien01 3y ago
          French public broadcasters are ad-supported, they don't have to separate local and overseas websites/apps/revenue logic. I've seen another comment about the BBC having ads for other BBC content; I already get ads in my Radio France podcasts (just the one before the proper content), and they're dynamic, so they surely change them depending on where you listening to maximize revenue. Probably the same type of dynamic advertising I get when listening to US podcasts with inverted French-speaking ads.
      • squarefoot 3y ago
        The Rock feed by Radio France is among my favorites online music radios. I don't use smartphones and don't like to keep a browser running just to listen to music, so I extracted the URL and use it into whichever player I have available. https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fiprock/fiprock_hifi.m3u8 https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fiprock/fiprock_hifi.m3u8
  • yung_steezy 3y ago
    I actually quite like BBC sounds but it is completely possible to circumvent it. You might need to look the URL of a show up on there but you can play any show on sounds using `mpv <URL>` I also use that method to listen to live radio: alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8' alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8' alias bbc2='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_two.m3u8' alias bbc3='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_three.m3u8' alias bbc4='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8' alias bbc5='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live.m3u8' alias bbc5x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra.m3u8' alias bbc6='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_6music.m3u8'
    • ajb 3y ago
      In the early days you could get the summary of The Archers episodes for the week in advance by twiddling the URL.... At some point they got wise to it, and they might get wise to this too.
      • roywiggins 3y ago
        If they lock their internet streams to their app, that'd kick themselves off of internet radio appliances, so it may not be feasible. (they did shut down their MP3 streams this year though, which probably did that to some older ones)
        • toyg 3y ago
          The main appliances (Google, Amazon) already go through a pre-installed BBC app to serve their content.
      • UncleSlacky 3y ago
  • drcongo 3y ago
    Every time I hear the BBC Sounds jingle - "Music, radio, podcasts" - I think of the show W1A where they referred to the the "Department for Culture, Media and Sport" as the "Department for Culture, Media and For Some Reason Sport". "Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more fitting.
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    There are multiple BBCs; the commercial arm ruins everything.
  • Affric 3y ago
    Me too. From Brexit to ruining IoT was when I decided I would no longer consider myself British. My citizenship is just be a piece of trivia now.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
    A number of BBC podcasts set their rss url to http:// http:// instead of https:// https://. One can still get these feeds over https/443 (see below). But podcast apps will try to use http/80 of course. Why does BBC do this. Or maybe it's the podcast apps that do it. Weird. "In Our Time" is one example. printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \ |nc -vvn 125.252.212.113 80 > 1.rss printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \ |openssl s_client -connect 125.252.212.113:443 -ign_eof > 1.rss
    • fomine3 3y ago
      Technically it only supports http in spec https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29985571/w3c-validator-says-feed-does-not-validate-url-must-be-a-full-url-whats-wr https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29985571/w3c-validator-s...
      • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
        TIL. In experiments I have run, most feeds use https.
  • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    There seems to have been a political attack against BBC comedy, which honestly was doing great work at raising awareness of political mischief and helping to shine a light on government wrongdoing and corruption. The killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks. In Our Time is an absolute tour de force. Bragg just brings such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of subjects. It's a delight to follow along in the wake of him and his guests.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • didntcheck 3y ago
    I'm surprised they even have those feeds at all. I presumed their days were numbered when Sounds came out. It's not just them, a lot of podcasts seem to really not want you to use their plain old RSS feed, instead hiding it behind collapsable segments and similar. I guess they get more metrics (and maybe money) if you use Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever. Then of course there are the ones with outright exclusivity deals It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web
• riffic 3y ago
  The BBC (or other orgs) can also implement ActivityPub directly into their existing content management systems. Mastodon is great but you don't need to use it to participate in the federated ecosystem edit: it's also news to me that the BBC has their own TLD. This opens up a lot of potential that others don't have the privilege of.
  • Knee_Pain 3y ago
    Yeah, this is a gripe I'm having recently with governments and news publications creating a whole website and Mastodon instance just to have a few publish-only profiles and comment-only options. Just implement a smaller Activity Pub server, no need for this Twitter clone stuff
    • mattmoose21 3y ago
      I imagine they use it to give employees accounts that they can manage. If I was a journalist at the bbc I could get an account on their instance and the bbc could manage verification and account management.
      • Knee_Pain 3y ago
        But Mastodon is not the only way to manage accounts and publish stuff. It has so much overhead because it has to look and behave like a Twitter clone, whereas you could simply have a barebones password protected web admin panel to allow each journalist to publish with their BBC-approved credentials.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
        • j_maffe 3y ago
          I'm unsure how much overhead there is since the service discussed above is functionally a micro-blogging service. Also I think you're missing on the important feature of having an easily recognized format (even if it is a clone)
• uhtred 3y ago
  does social media serve any purpose whatsoever besides marketing and PR, virtue signalling and self promotion? honestly, what genuine use does something like twitter, mastodon, instagram etc have? No one even reads the shit other people post, they just use it to hook into their own material. fucking weird world we live in now, where 90% of the population appears to be a narcissist.
  • ChrisArchitect 3y ago
    agree about the narcissism but for a news org, this is their RSS.
  • peterlk 3y ago
    Well, here I am replying to you on a social media platform (HN) to contribute to a discussion. So yes, social media does serve a purpose. It connects people and allows us to have discussions. The problem you mention is a huge one with modern social media, and I think that it is exacerbated by the perverse incentives of engagement (ad) driven monetization. But there are healthier ways to use social media, and shifting data ownership away from a centralized oligopoly to a federated, decentralized model is a step in the right direction
    • uhtred 3y ago
      Not really. HN is a forum.
      • chikitabanana 3y ago
        Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?
        • uhtred 3y ago
          common sense
    • Karellen 3y ago
      Is HN social media? I tend to distinguish social media from internet fora in that, social media is user-centric. You follow people. But a forum is topic-centric. You follow a discussion group with a specific purpose, and it's an implementation detail if it's hosted on a dedicated website, or a mailing list, or a newsgroup, or a subreddit. HN could be alt.news.ycombinator, or /r/hackernews. It isn't @hackernews, or... whatever facebook does. I definitely lean towards thinking of HN as a forum, rather than a brand of social media. Do you think that's a meaningful distinction?
• okasaki 3y ago
  Great to see the world's premier peddlers of NATO-cheerleading and sinophobia now on an open protocol.
  • dang 3y ago
    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• ChrisArchitect 3y ago
  Interesting of course, but also a 6 month trial so whatever that means for commitment who knows. Couple questions: There's a .bbc TLD? Being used anywhere else? TIL Who is hosting their instance - is it a third-party or did they spin up their own?
  • Shrezzing 3y ago
    There was a FoI request on the list of .bbc domains last year. As of Feb 2022, they ran alpha.bbc, labs.bbc, nic.bbc, taster.bbc, the.bbc, to.bbc. nic.bbc is the only one that resolves, I'd asusme the rest are for internal R&D projects and QA links. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/820849/response/1968810/attach/html/4/RFI20220086%20Response.pdf.html https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/820849/response/19688...
    • JdeBP 3y ago
      Since one of the newly awakened accounts is @BBCTaster@Social.BBC, we can be fairly sure what taster.bbc is for.
  • riffic 3y ago
    delegated to the root zone in 2015: https://icannwiki.org/.bbc https://icannwiki.org/.bbc
  • OJFord 3y ago
    Didn't know that either, they should use it for link shortening on the ..apex(? Root?) like bbc/deadbeef! Think they currently use bbc.news. I suppose a lot of people (also parsers) wouldn't realise it was a URL.
• traceroute66 3y ago
  Ironic really given that most of the rest of the BBC dedicates hours of airtime every week to denigrating social media ([1][2] etc. etc.) because the BBC are so desperate to maintain relevance in a era where (shock horror) you can actually find good quality unbiased content on the internet. Modern traditional media is barely any better than social media these days anyway. It ranges from blatantly biased (e.g. Daily Mail, Telegraph) to the BBC which is only unbiased when it suits them. Just as you can't believe everything you read on the internet, you can't believe everything the BBC tells you either (assuming they even bother to tell you in the first place .... see their silence about Michelle Mone and PPE for example, the BBC were silent when the story was reported in full everywhere else). [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jqjcj https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jqjcj [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRvrJ6Zb/is-social-media-ruining-our-lives https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRv...
  • Knee_Pain 3y ago
    How is it ironic? Their Mastodon instance is private and basically read-only, not social media. I don't think this is the thread best suited for excreting your obvious pent-up anger
  • flumpcakes 3y ago
    I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable than "new media" when they lie.
    • traceroute66 3y ago
      > I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable than "new media" when they lie. Except they are not. It is amazing, for example, how many times the BBC conveniently fails to correctly attribute an interviewee. So many times somebody is given a generic job title when they are actually working for a political lobby organisation for example.
      • flumpcakes 3y ago
        > Except they are not. In what way is new media more accountable? It seems the vast majority of Twitter accounts spew lies. In the last few years it seems to have become even worse for social media. I can write a complaint to the BBC for them to run a retraction, social media embraces the division and lies because the platform is not responsible for the content. I cannot envision at all how someone would consider old media less accountable than new media.
• brewdad 3y ago
  It's nice to see an organization like the BBC willing to experiment with alternative ideas. For those unaware, they also put their news web site on the onion network. https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/ https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...
  • reaperducer 3y ago
    If that's what you're into, the New York Times has been on Tor Onion for six years: https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/ https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l... https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york-times-as-a-tor-onion-service-e0d0b67b7482 https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york...
• brucethemoose2 3y ago
  I hope it doesn't get killed by CSAM spam or stuff like that from trolls. Automated federated filtering is not impossible. In fact, an distributed setup (where volunteers host image/text classifiers) like AI Horde already does seems pretty doable.
  • JdeBP 3y ago
    Unlikely. The BBC would be very daft to run an open-signup server. And a closed-signup server would only have the problems that BBC employees themselves bring.
    • brucethemoose2 3y ago
      But won't replies from other servers show up on the BBC's page if they post something?
      • JdeBP 3y ago
        Not necessarily, no. There's a whole long standing organization of sysops dedicated to silencing and blocking the (few, I've never even heard of one myself) places on the WWW that the sort of stuff that you are talking about would come from. If the BBC sysops are on the ball, they'll already be looking at what block lists to subscribe to. In fact, they've had the system up since June, and I wouldn't be surprised that they haven't already been importing blocklists. Alas, the "about" page doesn't say, as it normally would, what servers are moderated. But I can understand why the BBC would not want to get into the silly game that would (and does) result if it did publish its moderation list. It's not well publicized, and resources for new sysops being poor is one of the problems with Mastodon et al., but I hope that the BBC people are on the ball in this respect. * https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-...
        • brucethemoose2 3y ago
          > There's a whole long standing organization of sysops dedicated to silencing and blocking the (few, I've never even heard of one myself) places on the WWW that the sort of stuff that you are talking about would come from. I was thinking more along the lines of subreddit trolls, who will come in and spam shock/csam images trying to bait the mods, not actual CSAM distributors with known IPs or whatever. The BBC will certainly attract that kind of internet denizen. They would have to have employees (or automated system) staring at their post replies constantly, watching for this kind of stuff.
• rvz 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Kye 3y ago
    Mastodon is software. It doesn't platform anything any more than nginx or Libreoffice do. If you know of something like this on the two official instances, be sure to hit the report button.
• CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
  I didn't understand the need for the BBC to compete with other broadcasters until I realised they were just the government mouthpiece wrapped in shiny programming. Their moves into wider media, beyond TV and radio, are all about ensuring they can send their propaganda as far and as wide as possible, and nothing more.
• EnglishmanITGuy 3y ago
  [dead]
• darreninthenet 3y ago
  Interesting fact - the BBC has always been around experimenting with new media etc - in the early days of ISPs in the UK, the BBC was one of the first and in fact had the best (ie carried the most newsgroups) UseNet server from a UK based ISP at the time.
  • ta1243 3y ago
    BBC ran public multicast trials for live streaming back in 2006 -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/ Alas didn't go anywhere. Now nearly 20 years later many companies (amazon, netflix, bbc) still struggle with live streaming at scale
  • Barrin92 3y ago
    and not just new media either. They also sold about a million BBC Micros. In the early 80s most British schools had one. The British public system has produced a lot of pretty cool tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
    • darreninthenet 3y ago
      Yup I grew up with one of those, my dad got some bonus at work and bought a BBC Micro B (with a 5.25" floppy drive, gasp!) when I was 7 and it was my first encounter with a computer... and then he got the (original) Elite game and I was hooked on computers ever since
      • lttlrck 3y ago
        We also got a model B when my dad got a bonus (he was away for weeks during the miners' strike of '84) but we had a Radio Shack tape recorder [1] - not a floppy drive! Some years later we went to a store to buy a floppy drive but I ended up with an Atari ST instead. For not a lot more money... [1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/57/59/b15759f5425af9f2f6504d04d4a755eb.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/57/59/b15759f5425af9f2f650...
  • pessimizer 3y ago
• sdfghswe 3y ago
  I like the diagram on their page. Anyone here tried GnuSocial? What about bookwyrm? I searched "intelligent investor" (found) and "empower your investing" (not found). One problem I have with decentralization (and this is almost a nitpick) is how complex the mental model of those things are. Who decides which books exist on Bookwyrm? Who stores the reviews? etc etc. It's quite exhausting actually. I'm sure once one "wins" and you get used to it it's not an issue, but I think this friction is an issue for adoption.
  • input_sh 3y ago
    Same as any other book tracker (Goodreads or whatever): if the book isn't already there, you can add it yourself. You can also import it from other BookWyrm instances or from OpenLibrary.
• chefandy 3y ago
  Anybody considering ActivityPub for a general-audience social media project should give the challenges section a close read with an open mind and not reflexively minimize the negative parts of their experience. Before the big spike at the end of 2022, critiquing Mastodon's usability was tantamount to heresy in the FOSS crowd. Oddly, that didn't change much after many (most?) of those new users dropped Mastodon in the subsequent months. There is clearly a disconnect between what Mastodon offers, and what general, non-technical audiences want it to offer. ActivityPub and Mastodon are both fucking awesome, and I'm confident the Fediverse can support a social media tool painless enough for grandpa to confidently migrate his fly-fishing discussion group to from his Facebook group. I'm also sure all of the good work folks are doing on the existing tool set will still be valuable in that world; but it's probably not going to be the thing that makes decentralized social media the standard rather than a distant fringe alternative to most non-technical folks. I've got my eye on Bluesky but I'd really love to see someone figure out a way to tighten things up non-commercially. I've tried digging into the problem a few times, but the conceptual simplicity of centralized social media is a huge selling point for regular folks.
  • versteck 3y ago
    The answer to that is https://elk.zone https://elk.zone atm, a fun and chef's kiss interface (built with nuxt). You can insert elk.zone/ before any Mastodon url. https://phanpy.social https://phanpy.social is also great, with multi columns even for lists. A browser plugin like https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplified-federation/ https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplif... to follow, favorite, etc. directly on any server has also improved my experience a lot.
    • chefandy 3y ago
      Elk.zone looks cool and is definitely a nice face for Mastodon-- glad to know about it! However, the disconnect between non-technical users and what Mastodon offers is far deeper than the timeline layout and interactions. If users must practically understand how to negotiate federation to satisfy their most basic requirement-- nearly effortlessly finding and interacting with their friends, family and other sources within the interface-- then it's a non-starter for that crowd. Most developers seem not to realize a) how much more resistance dealing with the practical complexity of federation adds for non-technical users trying to do what they want to do, and b) how little resistance those users will tolerate to achieve their goals when they have free options. As it stands, the cost/benefit ratio to switching to Mastodon is not even in the ballpark of what it needs to be for nearly any social media user. Mastodon's huge active user base fluctuation 5-10 mos ago comprises about half a percent of Twitter's active monthly user base, which entirely leaves out Facebook, Instagram, Etc... and most of Mastodon's new ex-twitter users left.
• mxuribe 3y ago
  Firstly, this is so wonderful that they're trying this experiment, and of course the information that they shared to both manage expectations as well as provide a mini-primer on what all this "mastodon" and "fediver" stuff really is....Really cool!!! Secondly, for being NOT an OG org. on the fediverse, i have to say that the BBC folks here really nailed the definiton of the Fediverse: "...the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon..." I acknowledge that some newbies might not care so much about naunce and correctness of some topics, but i believe it matters...and i am impressed that BBC did such a great job here. Cheers and good luck to BBC folks running this!
• sitzkrieg 3y ago
  mastodon is the new mirc or kleenex
• drcongo 3y ago
  It really grinds my gears that the publicly funded BBC endlessly pushes its viewers to surveillance capitalism to interact in any way, creating wealth for two of the worst people on the planet, at the viewers' expense.
  • JdeBP 3y ago
    So this move that does not do this is a good thing, in your view?
    • drcongo 3y ago
      Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear!
• jrmg 3y ago
  As I follow these new accounts, I’m reminded of just how _hard_ it is to follow people on other servers on Mastodon. Click follow -> dialog full of text, which gives the most common instructions (to copy and paste into the search field on your server) in smaller text at the end -> go to my server -> there’s no search field, or anything that says ‘search’ -> [I know that this is because my window is too narrow] -> expand the window -> paste into the revealed search field -> click ‘follow’ on the result -> Phew! Now I have to do this again for the other accounts… I’m absolutely sure people become lost and give up at every step here.
  • barathr 3y ago
    That's just on the web interface -- all the apps make it much easier.
  • tempaccount420 3y ago
    Federations are the worst way to implement decentralization. All because people are afraid of blockchains.
    • regularjack 3y ago
      Right, it's only because of fear that blockchains aren't used for this use case, there are no other differences whatsoever.
  • anderspitman 3y ago
    Hopefully we'll see browser integration eventually
  • treyd 3y ago
    On Mastodon's interface if you see a foreign post locally on your timeline can see the poster's profile from there and follow it there. But all this is really a limitation of the web interfaces. There's extensions to assist with this process and desktop and mobile clients don't have this issue at all.
  • calgarymicro 3y ago
• JdeBP 3y ago
  This is the first major "name" to have set itself up in the FediVerse, after smaller outfits like (for examples) the Texas Observer and Bylines have been established there for some time. It does indicate which way the wind is now blowing; and they've done it the right way with a dedicated site under the BBC's own control. I think that this is going to be a problem in the medium term, though, unless actual people at the BBC start getting accounts. It will end up as a slightly depressing node full of robots, which perception will then have to be overcome.
  • NoboruWataya 3y ago
    > This is the first major "name" to have set itself up in the FediVerse In the news space maybe, but the European Union and the Dutch government already have their own instances.
  • rinze 3y ago
    The Financial Times (well, Alphaville, a kind of blog inside the main journal) ran a very short-lived experiment for a few months: https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcd https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788e...
  • input_sh 3y ago
    I agree with BBC being the first major English media, but German broadcasters have been doing it for a while now: https://zdf.social/about https://zdf.social/about and https://ard.social/about https://ard.social/about
• LelouBil 3y ago
  Every company/org posting their news using accounts on a decentralized interoperable service instance that they self host. This is the future.
• danschuller 3y ago
  I'm cheered to see any wider adoption of mastodon. For my very niche game engine developer follows Mastodon is now almost as good as twitter was but for mainstream or other niche interests it's got a ways to go.
• NoboruWataya 3y ago
  Always cool to see mainstream orgs get involved with the Fediverse and their explainer is good, but there is no way to ascertain what they will consider a successful experiment at the end of the six months. It leads me to believe there is a good chance the whole thing will be scrapped in a few months, which makes me less inclined to engage with it (which in turn increases the likelihood that it will be considered a failure, etc). I suppose it's better than silently subjecting it to a six-month probation period, but I can't imagine it is so expensive to maintain (and use as a mirror for their Twitter etc) that they need the probation period at all. And if in six months the BBC publicly pronounce that they don't see the value in Mastodon it will probably be a net negative for the Fediverse.
• dahwolf 3y ago
  It's good to experiment, but in this case even without experimentation you can draw some important conclusions about the benefits of centralized social media: - You own your account, but not the infra. I'm sure that BBC can manage to run Mastodon by throwing resources at it, but still...not needing to do that at all is appealing. - You don't have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there's barely anything to moderate. When a nutjob replies to your tweet, you're not responsible for it. Nor are you responsible for the handling of personal data of people replying. All of this is not your problem, which is nice. - For the time being, centralized social media has superior reach potential, not just because of the bigger audience potential, your account is also vastly easier to discover through search and algorithms. As an example, BBC world news has 40M followers on Twitter, whilst on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is exceptionally rare. - Federation/defederation wars may reduce your reach even further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it's typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a big thing on Mastodon. Bottom line is that you're adding operational and legal headaches with very little to show for it in comparison to the big networks.
  • mlindner 3y ago
    > on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is exceptionally rare. I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon. Are there actually accounts with more than 100K followers? If so who?
    • buildfocus 3y ago
      Creator of Mastodon has 330k. Not sure if he's #1 but he's a strong contender: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron https://mastodon.social/@Gargron EDIT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1cpUKkoT1MUn8_xM4usiERn-IdEuh0hXfBrwbbThwGiI/htmlview?pli=1# https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1cpUKkoT1MUn8_xM4... has a list of the big ones, looks like https://mastodon.social/mastodon https://mastodon.social/mastodon is top at 800k. > I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats says currently 2 million active monthly users, 9 million registered. That's just for Mastodon, so add another couple of million for the rest of the Fediverse.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  Anyone got graphs of Twitter/X active users Vs mastodon/activitypub active users?? Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved back to twitter.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• overnight5349 3y ago
  There's some interesting stuff happening with orgs on mastodon. Vice has a bot that posts their articles, but they've done some trickery where if you copy the link to a post, you get a link to the actual article on their website instead of a link to a mastodon post. It's a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub should be used.
• firecall 3y ago
  Do systems like Mastodon break the promise of Social Networks? In practice Mastodon doesn't seem to support the ability to actually be social. I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it opened in Safari. I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn't as I wasn't logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn't my instance. I'd then have needed to copy the post URL, login to my instance, and share it or do whatever you have to do in Mastodon. I moved onto other things, the process broke my flow. The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is that It'll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small number of major instances. An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might not. Running a Social Network is hard.
• Vicinity9635 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • kstrauser 3y ago
    I can't imagine any other reason a giant media organization would want to take control over its own fate, rather than trust in the mercurial whims of another company's grudge-owner who had to be sued into buying it. Yours is the only possible explanation.
    • Vicinity9635 3y ago
      [dead]
• merdaverse 3y ago
  Seeing this some non technical people will try out this Mastodon thing. If they can get past the initial hassle of choosing an instance to sign on they will try to 'Follow' the BBC account on the social.bbc instance, only to be greeted by this user friendly process: 1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account 2. Opening up their home instance 3. Going to the terrible search menu 4. Pasting the identifying string of the instance 5. Hoping the search doesn't bug out 6. Clicking follow and hoping the request doesn't bug out and remain in pending for months (yes, this happens) Instead of the process on 'traditional' social media which is: 1. Click the big shiny button Why they haven't yet fixed this glaring UX flaw using something like URL protocols is astonishing. I guess this is why technical people shouldn't design products. Nobody cares how it is built if it offers only friction to the end user.
  • krapp 3y ago
    Plenty of non-technical people have already succeeded at trying Mastodon out, and the process for following people outside of your instance, while awkward, doesn't seem to be the impossible hassle some make it out to be. Granted, there are a lot of rough edges around the UX of Mastodon but pasting a url into a form field is at worst mildly annoying.
    • merdaverse 3y ago
      My point is: if Mastodon can't get something as basic as an interaction with posts frictionless, I am skeptical that it can solve the more complicated problems, like profile migrations, discoverability, data retention etc.
• byndlimitsfy 3y ago
  I wonder how CNN will respond to this, I usually think there's some sort of competition between these two news outlets.