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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

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61–70 of 188 posts

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#61

Post by JdeBP »

Shrezzing wrote: post #15
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #10

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?

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/19688...

Since one of the newly awakened accounts is @BBCTaster@Social.BBC, we can be fairly sure what taster.bbc is for.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#62

Post by drcongo »

atchoo wrote: 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…

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#63

Post by JdeBP »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #27

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.

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#64

Post by jrmg »

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.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#65

Post by Barrin92 »

darreninthenet wrote: post #42

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.

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

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#66

Post by JdeBP »

drcongo wrote: post #59

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.

So this move that does not do this is a good thing, in your view?

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#67

Post by chikitabanana »

uhtred wrote: post #48
peterlk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not really. HN is a forum.

Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#68

Post by drcongo »

JdeBP wrote: post #66
drcongo wrote: post #59

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.

So this move that does not do this is a good thing, in your view?

Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear!

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#69

Post by barathr »

jrmg wrote: post #64

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] -> exp…

That's just on the web interface -- all the apps make it much easier.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#70

Post by egypturnash »

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.

With an entire Mastodon installation, then each journalist can also keep up with and talk to sources via a Twitter-like interface. Though they will quickly want to move any serious conversations with information sources elsewhere what with the big undismissable "hey this is NOT REALLY PRIVATE" sign at the top of the "private" messages column.

Also I suspect that "what if we just set up a Masto and see how it goes" might be a much smaller investment then "add AP to our CMS". They're only committing to six months of this right now.

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