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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

31–40 of 188 posts

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#31
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 that the twitter clone aspect is a big part of the overall appeal. Journalists are used to Twitter, as are consumers of news content.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#32

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.

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)

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#33
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

That could be coming, but it's probably easier to get the approval and funding to start a Mastodon instance and start learning for when/if they go further than to bolt on new functionality to the CMS.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#35
post #34

[flagged]

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#36
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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#37
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 fully agree with you, although this is still step in the right direction compared to them sticking to Twitter/FB/etc.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#39

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…

[flagged]

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#40
post #7
post #4

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 topica…

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.

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.

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