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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#141

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

There seems to have been a political attack against BBC comedy, which honestly was doing great work at raising awareness of political mischief and helping to shine a light on government wrongdoing and corruption.

The killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks.

In Our Time is an absolute tour de force. Bragg just brings such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of subjects. It's a delight to follow along in the wake of him and his guests.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#142

Post by lttlrck »

darreninthenet wrote: post #101
Barrin92 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup I grew up with one of those, my dad got some bonus at work and bought a BBC Micro B (with a 5.25" floppy drive, gasp!) when I was 7 and it was my first encounter with a computer... and then he got the (original) Elite game and I was hooked on computers ever since

We also got a model B when my dad got a bonus (he was away for weeks during the miners' strike of '84) but we had a Radio Shack tape recorder [1] - not a floppy drive!

Some years later we went to a store to buy a floppy drive but I ended up with an Atari ST instead. For not a lot more money...

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/57/59/b15759f5425af9f2f650...

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#143

Post by atchoo »

petepete wrote: post #7
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…

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.

For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.

It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#145

Post by squarefoot »

hadrien01 wrote: post #51
noneeeed wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like BBC Sounds is some senior manager's vanity project that they have staked their career on. Their obsession with trying to get me to use it instead of normal RSS feeds or third party radio services like TuneIn is incredibly frustrating. They have intentionally broken the experience for smart speaker users and podcast listeners because they are incapable of enticing them over with a better experience. The ob…

I feel the same about Radio France (the radio public broadcaster here in France, equivalent to BBC Radio + BBC Sounds). They've been pushing their app more and more, and now RSS feeds correctly list the episodes, but if you try to download one from a few months ago you just get an ad to download the app. No thanks.

The Rock feed by Radio France is among my favorites online music radios. I don't use smartphones and don't like to keep a browser running just to listen to music, so I extracted the URL and use it into whichever player I have available.

https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fiprock/fiprock_hifi.m3u8

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#146

Post by calgarymicro »

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…

They have very recently uploaded this flow a bit. Most servers don't seem to have it yet, but mastodon.social does. Now, the first time you try to follow or do something when your account is somewhere else, it asks you to type in your home server, then takes you there to log in. From then on, it will remember your home server and allow you to see the relevant post/profile on your server with one click. So the process is now click follow -> click 'Take me home' -> click follow again. Still not great, but a lot better than it was.

Example: https://i.imgur.com/MG1d5kV.jpg

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#147

Post by calgarymicro »

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.

Presumably the end goal would be to have BBC personalities with accounts on the BBC server, so at that point the Mastodon microblogging will make sense. This seems like a bit of a trial balloon that will hopefully lead to more.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#149

Post by kstrauser »

calgarymicro wrote: post #146
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…

They have very recently uploaded this flow a bit. Most servers don't seem to have it yet, but mastodon.social does. Now, the first time you try to follow or do something when your account is somewhere else, it asks you to type in your home server, then takes you there to log in. From then on, it will remember your home server and allow you to see the relevant post/profile on your server with one click. So the process…

That seems typical of the mastodon.social instance: roll out something that works for them, then likely call it a day and mark it solved.

There are about 23,000 fediverse servers online today. The mastodon.social instance is the largest, with about 1/5th of the monthly active users. The other 23,000 servers with the remaining 80% of users won't benefit nearly so much from that hacky feature.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#150

Post by kstrauser »

Vicinity9635 wrote: post #148

[flagged]

I can't imagine any other reason a giant media organization would want to take control over its own fate, rather than trust in the mercurial whims of another company's grudge-owner who had to be sued into buying it. Yours is the only possible explanation.
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