The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in 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, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypubOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Why an instance instead of joining an existing one? They can join the effort and do few ones where several publishers can use to create official accounts
Edit. Why you guys are downvoting a discussion? Is this place becoming reddit? We are just chatting, relax
exactly this, they can control what is on it, give their journalists, shows, etc accounts and it being a self contained hub for everything bbc, while interacting with rest of the fediverse.
Im guessing they will also get more statistics and information from hosting it themselves as well. its a no brainer.
Good point
Because then someone else would be able to control and censor their content. Really every business should make their own server to ensure that they're the ones fully in control of their content - this is the entire point of federation.
Good point. You guys are right. It is a good choice
Just for records sake, we can see recently with Musk and Twitter and how he manipulated NPR's image by denoting them as "state media".
I think the USA's National Weather Service Twitter presence is a good example.
If you look deep enough you'll see caveats like "supplemental service provided by NWS" and "Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information", but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.
That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:
Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly 'social media' style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won't be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.
Finally: if you're reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you'd like a fediverse presence, I did!
Thanks for the details
Good idea! I just emailed [email protected] to ask them not only for a Mastodon instance to replace this stuff, but also for a PeerTube instance to replace https://www.youtube.com/@noaanationalweatherservice .
Having their own instance as a public organization adds more legitimacy to their publications. Think of government officials using the organizations domains for email instead of gmail.
Them having their own instance would serve the same purpose as being verified because of the domain.
Thanks, makes sense
One of Germany's public broadcasting services also started running an instance for anyone part of the federal media network: https://ard.social/about
Translation:
Also the Tagesschau, which is the most important television news show in Germany, is there.
The other one did as well (https://zdf.social)
BBC is just a propaganda apparatus of the British government.
even if that's true, which it isn't, wouldn't that still be a hundred times bettee than shit like Fox News? or what Bezos did with news company he bought?
They are just the same as fox news
well that's some ignorant shit, lol
"I have no idea what I'm saying"
I wouldn't read too hard into it, he's just trolling this comment thread based on his profile 🙄
It is successful troll then. They got good numbers on the down side of votes. That's the troll goal, right?
whats about my profile?
That’s not true at all. I would like to see your evidence of claim on this one.
If you look at the structure of the BBC, it's an INDEPENDENT, publicly funded news organisation. The government has no say in its editorial. It has exposed many British government scandals in the past.
While the person you're replying to seems to be trolling, there is a legitimate argument that the BBC is influenced by the current government. The argument is that the current government has had a hand in appointing the current BBC director, and he's a member of the Conservative party or a donor.
I haven't looked into it for a while, so am not up to speed on the details, but if the detractors are correct, it's not a good look for the BBC.
Unfortunately, BBC news has been corrupted from the inside. It used to be impressively independent of the UK government. It was happy to hold any politician's feet to the fire. This is why the conservative party worked so hard to put their own stooge at the top. Careers now stop progressing, if you are overly critical of the government, at least in the news department.
Overall the BBC still leans slightly left, and produces a lot of good material. I no longer trust it to report evenly on our government anymore. It's still a lot better than most news organisations overall however.
They have their moments of this. But they still do have some genuinely good stuff.
Every media is. You must filter news from multiple Organisation to understand the Real news
true that.
At least it's not as bad as Al Jazeera.
Even though I take issue with the BBC, I hope they choose to stay on mastadon in the long term. A large organisation like the BBC on a federated platform is sure to spread word and hopefully convince more people to join the fediverse and see it a a feasible alternative to the current big tech landscape.
This is how twitter and Youtube picked up pace. News organizations stsrted slowly creeping towards it and they have a lot of incentive to do so with how twitter is becoming a cesspool of Nazis and CSAM.
What social do most UK users use ATM? Are they on meta/twitter or some UK specific one?
Pretty much the same as the US (and I imagine other English-speaking countries) with similar age distribution (i.e. facebook mums, tiktok kids) and of course toxic cesspit behaviour on twiitter.
I think this is exactly what I want to see, news orgs (not just "mainstream" news, but let's say, professional orgs in an industry) hosting their own instances with closed signups for accounts with JUST relevant topics. I tried to find some journalists on journa.host to fill in tech and local news, and while I found the people, it was way too much personal/personality content and not as much news.
Relying on a third party for your social media presence is a bad idea. Imagine if Elon got a bug up his ass and banned all BBC accounts; they’d be left in a lurch. Or if, as we saw, someone else got a blue checkmark and pretended to be the BBC.
But by running their own site they have control over who posts what, while still able to interact with users on other instances.
I think governmental organizations should do the same. It's absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon's goodwill.
The Dutch government already made an official mastodon instance: social.overheid.nl
The Netherlands just can't stop being based
With Mastodon being a German non-profit company, it's natural that Germany is also well-represented with a federal instance social.bund.de, instance for the state of Baden-Württemberg bawü.social (both since 2020), world's largest public broadcasters ARD ard.social and ZDF zdf.social, and AFAIK the first news publisher to officially launch its own instance, Heise social.heise.de. There are probably loads of other instances and accounts I'm missing.
PS: The production company behind ZDF Magazin Royale (late night comedy and investigative journalism show, think Last Week Tonight ) is also running a private instance edi.social and a public instance det.social, named after the Mainzelmännchen.
Someone tell me how to feel! Do I hate this or like this!?
edit: I have been told to like this, and thus... I do.
Disclaimer: please ignore my negative initial vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post https://lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
It's a news organisation, so it's okay. We definitely want more journalists and news organisations in the Fediverse. I'd much rather have them directly on mastodon than the million different bird.tld mirrors.
Yes, and it also prides itself on journalistic values, unlike a lot of the Murdoch empire, for example.
yes, unless it reports on the Iraq war and use ‘embedded’ journalists or reports on the Syria war and instead of sending journalists on the ground, just reprints white house memos or reporting on lgbt issues and just parrots gender critical views. But apart from that, it’s integrity is 100%, or just the bar is too low these days, idk ;(
Its all biased waffling, but personally I prefer governments more than corporations.
yeah, totally. But if BBC calls for your rape and lynching, and then you see your opinion downvoted, it only means lemmy is as toxic as reddit.
This seems quite a harsh accusation. Would you be able to link the BBC article where they called for someone's rape and lynching.
Btw, I assume the downvotes arrived because your posts seem a bit toxic 🤔 But you can prove me wrong, once you linked the article you mentioned.
Ah yes, I too remember when the BBC openly advocated rape and lynching.
BBC is not a news organization, it's government propaganda as it always was intended
People on the left think it's government propaganda, people on the right think it's left-wing.
These things can't both be correct.
Why not?
The current UK government isn't left wing.
It is good in that it makes Mastodon more useful. People can use Mastodon instead of Twitter to see BBC tweets.
And karma isn't a thing here, otherwise I just blew a lot of it on North Korea.
Although there's not a general karma score on your profile, seeing a post heavily downvoted tends to make people disregard it... I assume it's the intention, that or to make the user feel unhappy / harried and close their profile
Maybe, but we aren't at the critical mass where downvotes posts and comments are routinely hidden. People will see downvoted content and interact with it.
You are also missing that the other site used karma as a way to judge if an account should be allowed to talk more. I had enough karma there so that I stopped getting the "you're commenting too much" pause when commenting a lot. Some subs also used minimum karma points as a way to judge if someone was a troll or not. That doesn't exist here.
Me anytime I do anything that sometimes gets anyone slightly upset
I can’t figure out how to quote that comment. When I click the quote things it doesn’t work. I have settled with italics
Got it thanks
You can manually do a quote block the same as on reddit, just put a right-chevron (I don't know how to type it without it triggering quote, mine is the same key as ".") directly before the text
Just like on reddit, the escape character is a \. You can easily remember this by thinking of all the shrug emoticons that were missing their arm, like so: ¯_(ツ)_/¯ because the backslash wasn't itself escaped.
So, if you want to type a character that normally results in formatting, precede it with a blackslash.
\*checks notes* results in *checks notes* instead of checks notes.
Edit: This comment was confusing to format. haha
Hey, thanks very much for this info! And yeah I'm sure it was not trivial to format haha
Exactly my thoughts.
p.s. You can quote using the ">" (greater than) symbol at the beginning of the line.
Disclaimer: please ignore my initial negative vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post https://lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
Dude, get rid of that stupid disclaimer. Do you seriously put that at the bottom of all your comments?
No one cares.
Love you too man!
Disclaimer: please ignore my initial negative vote score, as I have the privilege of being bot-downvoted by CCP sympathizers because of comments on this post https://lemmy.world/post/2338419, there is also the possibility that I’m just an asshole.
I think it depends on what sort of content is posted. If it's mostly promotional stuff some people may feel that it doesn't fit the vibe of Mastodon. If it's thought-provoking content (especially journalism) then it will be a win. Either way, having The BBC on Mastodon seems like a big deal, to me, and maybe it will induce other journalists to explore the fediverse.
It's risk mitigation on their part to not have their platform controlled by somebody else, especially someone with an agenda like Elon Musk.
Would like to see them set up a Lemmy instance as well.
And of course, it's always good to get in these things early, but not too early in case things don't work out.
Federation is the future of social media for exactly this reason, especially in the twitter-like realm where who is saying it is as (or more) important than what is being said. These people and organizations need to control their brand outside the scope of commercial pressure from the platform.
I know right? So great to be in a place where nobody cares who you are. Gets tiring.
It's nice to just not stand out and be accepted as a normal member of a community.
As a Canadian I’ve sent a formal letter to the CBC asking them to do the same. I’d suggest other Canadians join me and send formal letters to CBC on their site if you want something like this here in Canada. Personally, I really like how BBC did this and would love others to follow.
It's interesting that they decided to make their own server and not just join a popular instances like Mastodon Social. I know part of it is then experimenting but if the goal is to just have a presence in the Fediverse, it sounds like a lot of effort for little reason.
It's interesting you have this opinion; I figured this would be the biggest draw for corporations-- they're no longer beholden to some third party for their media presence-- it's all hosted and controlled by themselves;.
In email terms, it's the difference between
[email protected]and[email protected].Edit: I don't have any idea why I went with
tide, so if you find yourself wondering why I did that, get in line. haha[email protected]
VS
[email protected]
Lol
It also solves the verification problem. It's without a doubt the best way to go for an organization - especially news orgs.
That's true, but to be honest there's already a pretty good verification system on Mastodon, even if you don't host your own instance.
Yes and no. And verifying by domain is better, especially for people who are likely to be impersonated (ex. Journalists).
Rel="me" doesn't actually verify a user's identity, it verifies that a user has a relationship with a website. The problem is that you need to leave Mastodon to make sure that the website actually verifies their identity. I've verified a connection between a Mastodon and Pixelfed account, for example, but it doesn't tell you anything about who I am. It's also much easier to spoof a website than it is to get the BBC to give you an account on their private instance.
It really works great the other way though! If you have a known identity here, you can be sure that the linked sites are legit.
I would give you all the uploads if I could. This 1,000%
It's instant verification for all their accounts and an instance that won't disappear on them.
You may as well say the same thing about having their own website vs using Facebook.
This kind of thing is exactly the point of the Fediverse. They control and own their content, they control who gets to post from their URL.
Treat it like email. Thats how Mastodon will grow
No, this is what they should be doing. It's the difference between owning your house and renting. They get to make the rules on their instance, they're not at the mercy of a tech bro company or a trash billionaire that might have a political agenda against actual journalism...
After what happened to the BBC and NPR on Twitter, who can blame them for saying "Fine, we'll do it ourselves!"
I guess with twitter they learned the lesson of being beholden to a rogue CEO/admin who can take away verified status or change the rules on a whim. It is better that they maintain their own official presence that they control.
Could be that BBC employees can have their own accounts on mastodon going forward
No but you need a loicense
Nice, now a BBC in the fediverse is not just that thing.
We should support them as this is a pretty significant entity moving into the space. Leave nice comments, encouraging comments.
Awesome news! Hopefully more media follows suit!
This is great. I don't really care about the BBC since I'm not from or live in the UK, but more decentralization is always good.
I mean, while that's fair, they cover worldwide as well, I'd say most of the news they cover is worldwide.
Thats true. I'm not in an english speaking country so their news generally don't reach me.
Yeah, it's not global coverage but they do have channels in select countries.
Their coverage is just really shitty.
Is Mastodon compatible with Lemmy?
Only somewhat. Lemmy Communities show up as users when viewed from mastodon, that boost every single post and comment in the community (so browsing it is near impossible, and there is no sorting). Mastodon users can interact with posts (but can't downvote), and they can post by @-ing the community.
You can't follow mastodon users or view mastodon posts from Lemmy. I heard kbin had some functionality to do with this tho
Gonna be honest, Fediverse is alpha as shit.
In terms of being unfinished, not chad-like.
This is gonna take a whiiiiiile to get real good, if reworking these things is even on the table.
It's sad that I thought you meant the chad version first. My brain is corrupted
What?
I agree in a lot of ways. Lemmy does feel very beta at times. Mastodon does feel much more finished, except for the fact that favorites and boosts don't federate properly a lot of the time.
But this specifically feels perfectly fine to me. The fact that they're interoperable at all is more than I'd expect. Lemmy and Mastodon are so different in how they show content that I can't think of a much better way to do it (other than maybe having communities boost only posts and not comments when seen from mastodon).
How do you think they should be reworked to work better with each other?
@Comment105 @jocanib yes
I've seen people say this, but how? Are any lemmy clients compatible with mastodon in the sense that you can follow people or instances? I thought that was the big draw of kbin, that it combined both.
You can follow Lemmy communities on your Mastadon account. But I wouldn't recommend it. You get a string of out-of-context posts dominating your feed.
I mean I'd be more interested in it going the other way, and following a few mastodon accounts on my lemmy app. I'm not on mastodon and don't care to post there, but it'd be nice to be able to see some select things in my feed.
Try kbin, they are still separate feeds I think but you get both on the same website
Kbin does Lemmy and Mastadon.
From a mastodon users point of view a Lemmy user behaves like another Mastodon user. For instance this is what my Lemmy profile looks like from mastodon:
Lemmy communities also behave kinda like users:
.
Even though they boost ( e.g. "retweet" ) everything that has been posted to the community. Be it a thread or a new comment.
The big upside of kbin is, that it, as you said, combines micro blogging and news aggregation. While Mastodonusers can interact with lemmy content users on lemmy can only reply to comments posted from Mastodon. We have no real way to send a toot (e.g. "tweet") to mastodon deliberately.
https://vijayprema.com/using-lemmy-from-my-existing-mastodon/
I've been doing this a lot over on https://lemmy.world/c/coys. I mostly post directly from my Mastodon account.
Sometimes I have to jump over and use my Lemmy account because, for example, you can't post links (that I know of) in the same way you can directly on Lemmy.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: ![email protected]
Pretty damn cool tbh
Ah yes, the massive (pun intended) drawback of hashtags. Unless you actually wanted to follow a mix of news and porn.
"Unless"?
That's a good time, my friend!
Wow this is greats news, hoping more people join federated social network!
For those on a Kbin instance you can follow the whole instance to see everything they post:
https://kbin.social/d/social.bbc
If this is a success many more should follow
is there a way to subscribe to that from lemmy?
I don't think so since lemmy doesn't integrate with mastodon like kbin
@dumples @jocanib @amanaftermidnight how can i follow kbin from mastodon??
Same old. Just follow specific users by copying their full ID (e.g. @Teppic @kbin.social without the space) onto the search on Mastodon and follow as normal.
We should perhaps use hashtags more here because that would would be another way for Mastodon users to find/follow kbin content.
Going the other way to contribute to a kbin magazine from Mastodon, If you want the post to appear in a particular magazine, simply mention it in the post content, for example, "@fediverse @kbin.social" (no space) Note it will appear in the Microblog section.
@Teppic @jocanib @amanaftermidnight @dumples @kbin nice! Thanks a lot 😃
The more exposure the better (for better or worse). As the fediverse grows we gotta watch for the growing pains of becoming a large social media platform.
Nice. That's a good idea and I'm happy that the BBC is taking these kinds of steps. Followed the R&D account. Thanks!
Is it possible to follow their account if I'm on Lemmy.world? I'm sorry I'm new to all this.
You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastadon but not the other way around. And it doesn't work well anyway.
You can use Kbin for both Lemmy and Mastadon.
But Mastadon content is not very Lemmy-like so if all you want is the BBC toots, but not a Mastadon account, you might as well bookmark bbc.social and scroll it occasionally.
Speaking of federation: How do we get at it here in Lemmy land?
DeFeDeRaTe NoW!
huh?
Ah yes, more transphobic capitalist corporation on the fedi, surely federating with them will have no repercussion whatsoever /s Fuck them and anyone who federate with this bigots
Truly this is what winning looks like.
Edgy af
Spoken like a true nazi
the BBC loves to push genocide denial, what a wonderful group of people over there in jolly old England
What are you referring to? Legitimately curious
What's their instance on Palestinian genocide by Israel?
Is there an editorial about it? They do have a bias, as all news networks do, but I didn't see any statements about Israel and Palestine other than facts.
I am talking about their bias and misinformation they spread regarding other countries. I mean, they recently have done a whole thing about personality cult in some countries while at the same fucking time England arrest people that won't bow to their new king.
I think you're mixing up the news network with the country (England /= BBC). Here's a BBC article of the man who was arrested for protesting against the monarchy, and here is another one about the same subject.
And they also have their own cult of personality, they are a very big network with a great range of content.
You talk a lot without any links backing you up.
We don't know. What is it?
You know, link us to something.
Sauce plox.
Update: I asked for proof, got downvoted and op updated their comment completely with no mention of the original comment. Super cool.
What do you mean?
For example, I think the atrocities committed by russia against Ukraine is pretty well covered so they do not deny russian fascist behaviour at all. Heck, they report on china being buddy-buddy with russia and thus china supporting the war on Ukraine is also covered nicely. I think the BBC is doing fine. Unless you live under the fascist rule of these countries, then you suddenly cannot see clearly anymore. Is that perhaps your problem, that you live in one these shitholes?