The BBC on Mastodon

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 There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date...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.

Firstly, this is so wonderful that they&#x27;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 &quot;mastodon&quot; and &quot;fediver&quot; stuff really is....Really cool!!!<p>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: &quot;...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...&quot; 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!

It&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...</a>

The BBC (or other orgs) can also implement ActivityPub directly into their existing content management systems.<p>Mastodon is great but you don&#x27;t need to use it to participate in the federated ecosystem<p>edit: it&#x27;s also news to me that the BBC has their own TLD. This opens up a lot of potential that others don&#x27;t have the privilege of.

Anybody considering ActivityPub for a general-audience social media project should give the <i>challenges</i> 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&#x27;s usability was tantamount to heresy in the FOSS crowd. Oddly, that didn&#x27;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.<p>ActivityPub and Mastodon are both <i>fucking awesome</i>, and I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve got my eye on Bluesky but I&#x27;d really love to see someone figure out a way to tighten things up non-commercially. I&#x27;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.

As I follow these new accounts, I’m reminded of just how _hard_ it is to follow people on other servers on Mastodon.<p>Click follow -&gt; 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 -&gt; go to my server -&gt; there’s no search field, or anything that says ‘search’ -&gt; [I know that this is because my window is too narrow] -&gt; expand the window -&gt; paste into the revealed search field -&gt; click ‘follow’ on the result -&gt; Phew!<p>Now I have to do this again for the other accounts…<p>I’m absolutely sure people become lost and give up at every step here.

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.

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.

Interesting of course, but also a 6 month trial so whatever that means for commitment who knows.<p>Couple questions:<p>There&#x27;s a .bbc TLD? Being used anywhere else? TIL<p>Who is hosting their instance - is it a third-party or did they spin up their own?

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).<p>I suppose it&#x27;s better than <i>silently</i> subjecting it to a six-month probation period, but I can&#x27;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&#x27;t see the value in Mastodon it will probably be a net negative for the Fediverse.

This is the first major &quot;name&quot; 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&#x27;ve done it the right way with a dedicated site under the BBC&#x27;s own control.<p>I think that this is going to be a problem in the medium term, though, <i>unless</i> actual <i>people</i> 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.

It&#x27;s good to experiment, but in this case even without experimentation you can draw some important conclusions about the benefits of centralized social media:<p>- You own your account, but not the infra. I&#x27;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.<p>- You don&#x27;t have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there&#x27;s barely anything to moderate. When a nutjob replies to your tweet, you&#x27;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.<p>- 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.<p>- Federation&#x2F;defederation wars may reduce your reach even further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it&#x27;s typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a big thing on Mastodon.<p>Bottom line is that you&#x27;re adding operational and legal headaches with very little to show for it in comparison to the big networks.

Every company&#x2F;org posting their news using accounts on a decentralized interoperable service instance that they self host.<p>This is the future.

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 &#x27;Follow&#x27; the BBC account on the social.bbc instance, only to be greeted by this user friendly process:<p>1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account<p>2. Opening up their home instance<p>3. Going to the terrible search menu<p>4. Pasting the identifying string of the instance<p>5. Hoping the search doesn&#x27;t bug out<p>6. Clicking follow and hoping the request doesn&#x27;t bug out and remain in pending for months (yes, this happens)<p>Instead of the process on &#x27;traditional&#x27; social media which is:<p>1. Click the big shiny button<p>Why they haven&#x27;t yet fixed this glaring UX flaw using something like URL protocols is astonishing. I guess this is why technical people shouldn&#x27;t design products. Nobody cares how it is built if it offers only friction to the end user.

I&#x27;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&#x27;s got a ways to go.

I like the diagram on their page. Anyone here tried GnuSocial? What about bookwyrm? I searched &quot;intelligent investor&quot; (found) and &quot;empower your investing&quot; (not found).<p>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&#x27;s quite exhausting actually.<p>I&#x27;m sure once one &quot;wins&quot; and you get used to it it&#x27;s not an issue, but I think this friction is an issue for adoption.

There&#x27;s some interesting stuff happening with orgs on mastodon. Vice has a bot that posts their articles, but they&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub should be used.

I wonder how CNN will respond to this, I usually think there&#x27;s some sort of competition between these two news outlets.

Anyone got graphs of Twitter&#x2F;X active users Vs mastodon&#x2F;activitypub active users??<p>Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved back to twitter.

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&#x27; expense.

Do systems like Mastodon break the promise of Social Networks?<p>In practice Mastodon doesn&#x27;t seem to support the ability to actually be social.<p>I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it opened in Safari.<p>I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn&#x27;t as I wasn&#x27;t logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn&#x27;t my instance.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is that It&#x27;ll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small number of major instances.<p>An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might not. Running a Social Network is hard.

mastodon is the new mirc or kleenex

I hope it doesn&#x27;t get killed by CSAM spam or stuff like that from trolls.<p>Automated federated filtering is not impossible. In fact, an distributed setup (where volunteers host image&#x2F;text classifiers) like AI Horde already does seems pretty doable.

does social media serve any purpose whatsoever besides marketing and PR, virtue signalling and self promotion?<p>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.<p>fucking weird world we live in now, where 90% of the population appears to be a narcissist.

I didn&#x27;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.<p>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.

Great to see the world&#x27;s premier peddlers of NATO-cheerleading and sinophobia now on an open protocol.

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.<p>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&#x27;t believe everything you read on the internet, you can&#x27;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).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;p04jqjcj" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;p04jqjcj</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;articles&#x2F;3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRvrJ6Zb&#x2F;is-social-media-ruining-our-lives" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;programmes&#x2F;articles&#x2F;3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRv...</a>