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The BBC on Mastodon

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Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#131

Post by uhtred »

egypturnash wrote: post #123
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.

Do you have... friends? You can follow friends and see what they are saying throughout the day, and maybe converse with them, in a lower-commitment manner than having a private chat with just them. Their other friends might be part of this conversation too. Maybe some of their other friends will become your friend too. You have to have some friends first though. If you don't have any then I could easily see how it lo…

I have friends, but I guess I don't see the need to converse with them in public for all to see- why not use something private like whatsapp or signal? Why the need to show everyone else that you have friends?

Do you post a status update telling all your "friends" that you stubbed your toe and then feel depressed when you don't get many heart emojis?

Or do you post a really witty observation about something in the news, so witty you spent all morning thinking of it, and then get depressed when no one reposts it?

sure though, you only use it to communicate with your friends.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#132

Post by vitorgrs »

mlindner wrote: post #117
dahwolf wrote: post #116

It'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?

Mastodon has more than 10 million... but a lot of these are probably duplicated, bots, etc. Active users are about 1.7 million iirc.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#133

Post by flumpcakes »

traceroute66 wrote: post #20
flumpcakes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable than "new media" when they lie.

> I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable than "new media" when they lie. Except they are not. It is amazing, for example, how many times the BBC conveniently fails to correctly attribute an interviewee. So many times somebody is given a generic job title when they are actually working for a political lobby organisation for example.

> Except they are not.

In what way is new media more accountable?

It seems the vast majority of Twitter accounts spew lies. In the last few years it seems to have become even worse for social media.

I can write a complaint to the BBC for them to run a retraction, social media embraces the division and lies because the platform is not responsible for the content.

I cannot envision at all how someone would consider old media less accountable than new media.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#135

Post by overnight5349 »

There's some interesting stuff happening with orgs on mastodon. Vice has a bot that posts their articles, but they've done some trickery where if you copy the link to a post, you get a link to the actual article on their website instead of a link to a mastodon post.

It's a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub should be used.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#136

Post by Karellen »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #113
Karellen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> I think any site that people use primarily to interact with others (in public, I guess) is arguably social media.

Isn't that just "the internet"? If mailing lists and newsgroups and BBSs and blogs with comment sections and instant messaging/chat rooms and forums and wikis are all "social media", why did anyone invent the term "social media" 20 years after it had existed instead of just continuing to say "the internet". Or, shudder, "information superhighway" if they really needed a hip slang moniker to use instead?

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#137

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

A number of BBC podcasts set their rss url to http:// instead of https://. One can still get these feeds over https/443 (see below). But podcast apps will try to use http/80 of course.

Why does BBC do this. Or maybe it's the podcast apps that do it. Weird.

"In Our Time" is one example.

   printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
   |nc -vvn 125.252.212.113 80 > 1.rss

   printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
   |openssl s_client -connect 125.252.212.113:443 -ign_eof > 1.rss

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#138

Post by UncleSlacky »

ajb wrote: post #85
yung_steezy wrote: post #60

Earlier 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.

The much-missed Beeb-O-Tron[0] used to have a function to do this called the "Beebobodge"[1], given any timeslot in the week. Nowadays I use Radiofeeds[2] to get live URL stream links which I play through Transmission on Android or VLC on PC.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100402115118/http://beebotron....

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100408073914/http://beebotron....

[2] http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#139

Post by mdaniel »

roywiggins wrote: post #40
petepete wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that a lot of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to just block them and the player skips over it

My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#140

Post by firecall »

Do systems like Mastodon break the promise of Social Networks?

In practice Mastodon doesn't seem to support the ability to actually be social.

I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it opened in Safari.

I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn't as I wasn't logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn't my instance.

I'd then have needed to copy the post URL, login to my instance, and share it or do whatever you have to do in Mastodon. I moved onto other things, the process broke my flow.

The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is that It'll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small number of major instances.

An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might not. Running a Social Network is hard.

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