Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. HN is a forum.
Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?
common sense
The BBC on Mastodon
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#112Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#113Earlier 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…
Is HN social media? I tend to distinguish social media from internet fora in that, social media is user-centric. You follow people . But a forum is topic-centric. You follow a discussion group with a specific purpose, and it's an implementation detail if it's hosted on a dedicated website, or a mailing list, or a newsgroup, or a subreddit. HN could be alt.news.ycombinator, or /r/hackernews. It isn't @hackernews, or..…
Personally I don't think it's a meaningful distinction. You can engage primarily with topics on Twitter and Facebook (hashtags, pages, etc), and you can engage primarily with people on HN and Reddit (by mostly hanging out in the comments). Reddit in particular falls squarely in the social media camp to me, and while HN is maybe more topic-focused again (self-posts are less common), it is a matter of degree.
I think any site that people use primarily to interact with others (in public, I guess) is arguably social media. (Looking forward to being savaged by HN pedants looking to reduce that definition to absurdity.)
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#114Earlier 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'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 requir…
"that add signature requirements to public APIs to reduce bot and spam load" Hmm? Are you talking about AUTHORIZED_FETCH? That's specifically an opt-in (and discouraged) feature that's meant to reduce the possibility of blocked instances retrieving your posts and displaying/replying to them on their own servers, it has nothing to do with bot or 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."
I don't think this is true even when using AUTHORIZED_FETCH, Mastodon still displays the minimum set of Actor information necessary to complete a follow request (public key, username, etc), so I don't really know what this part of the post might be referring to.
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#115It'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. https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...
If that's what you're into, the New York Times has been on Tor Onion for six years:
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...
https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york...
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#116It's good to experiment, but in this case even without experimentation you can draw some important conclusions about the benefits of centralized social media:
- You own your account, but not the infra. I'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.
- You don't have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there's barely anything to moderate. When a nutjob replies to your tweet, you'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.
- 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.
- Federation/defederation wars may reduce your reach even further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it's typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a big thing on Mastodon.
Bottom line is that you're adding operational and legal headaches with very little to show for it in comparison to the big networks.
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#117It's good to experiment, but in this case even without experimentation you can draw some important conclusions about the benefits of centralized social media: - You own your account, but not the infra. I'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. - You don't have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there's bar…
> on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is exceptionally rare.
I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon. Are there actually accounts with more than 100K followers? If so who?
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#118Anyone got graphs of Twitter/X active users Vs mastodon/activitypub active users??
Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved back to twitter.
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#119As 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…
Federations are the worst way to implement decentralization. All because people are afraid of blockchains.
Right, it's only because of fear that blockchains aren't used for this use case, there are no other differences whatsoever.
Re: The BBC on Mastodon
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually quite like BBC sounds but it is completely possible to circumvent it. You might need to look the URL of a show up on there but you can play any show on sounds using `mpv ` I also use that method to listen to live radio: alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8' alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/s…
In the early days you could get the summary of The Archers episodes for the week in advance by twiddling the URL.... At some point they got wise to it, and they might get wise to this too.
If they lock their internet streams to their app, that'd kick themselves off of internet radio appliances, so it may not be feasible.
(they did shut down their MP3 streams this year though, which probably did that to some older ones)