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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#21

Post by mattmoose21 »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #14
riffic wrote: post #3

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.

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

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#22

Post by Knee_Pain »

mattmoose21 wrote: post #21
Knee_Pain wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#23

Post by exitb »

riffic wrote: post #3

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.

So the only way to see the posts and interactions on the web would be via other instances?

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#24

Post by jeroenhd »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #14
riffic wrote: post #3

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.

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

I've been looking into hacking ActivityPub into some projects that I run but there are a lot of caveats. For one, there's "ActivityPub" and there's "ActivityPub that Mastodon (and therefore most of the Fediverse) can interoperate with reliably".

For example, Mastodon has some artifical requirements that add signature requirements to public APIs to reduce bot and spam load. This isn't in the spec as a mandatory requirement, but if you don't do it then parts of the Fediverse won't be able to follow you. There are also expectations attached to certain activities that aren't in the spec but will confuse people on most other servers.

The easiest solution I came up with was to run a server that already does all of the hard work (gotosocial, Mastodon, etc) and call its API to add new posts.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#25

Post by riffic »

exitb wrote: post #23
riffic wrote: post #3

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.

So the only way to see the posts and interactions on the web would be via other instances?

I run a wordpress instance that also federates to the ActivityPub ecosystem with a plugin. You can navigate directly to my site to see my posts and I imagine anyone else's CMS can do that too with the right protocol enabled.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#26

Post by jeroenhd »

riffic wrote: post #5
system16 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#27

Post by brucethemoose2 »

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#28

Post by monooso »

traceroute66 wrote: post #12

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 M…

You clearly have your own pre-existing gripes with the BBC, which have very little to do with this story.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#29

Post by da02 »

uhtred wrote: post #6

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.

Very true. There is some positive news. Most books could be said to be "trash", but book publishing is still important. The same was said with blogs: "Oh, most blogs are about people having breakfast." But, I remember Joel on Software, Scripting.com, LRC, and Mises Blog that all had such a positive effect on me. So it is with social media: - people are meeting and getting married via Instagram. - I have chatted with Ph.Ds on Twitter and Youtube, even though I have no college degree. - I helped a UI/UX designer have lunch with Alan Kay. All of it via Twitter. That is something that will never happen to me because I am not in the same "league". He later casually mentioned he had lunch with Ted Nelson. (Sigh! That will never happen to me.) - And lots of people here probably have an anecdote how one-thing-led-to-another that made life a little bit happier. Jeff Tucker would probably say, "It doesn't matter if 98% are narcissistic hunters/gathers. That 2% can change The World and Your Life." (Of course, you would say it more eloquently.)

At least this is what I say to myself when I get depressed we are living in the 21st Century World and people care more about letting men inside women's bathrooms than the fact the US and its "allies" just bombed the Nordstream pipeline that will have a negative effect on millions of Europeans... and how I will be downvoted (2718 currently) for posting this. But, at least you are not alone "uhtred".

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#30

Post by [deleted] »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #22
mattmoose21 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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]
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