151–160 of 188 posts
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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 intern…
Yes, I would consider basically all of those things to be social media, with the possible exception of wikis and blogs where most people don't go to the blog specifically to comment and read others' comments. They are all media for social interaction.
On the other hand, news websites like bbc.co.uk or company websites like microsoft.com are not, generally speaking, social media.
I realise we can argue forever about the corners of this loose definition I haphazardly threw out. But what is the rationale for distinguishing between Reddit and HN (on the one side) and Twitter and Facebook (on the other)? The root comment of this thread complained about social media being full of marketing, PR, virtue signalling and self-promotion. You can argue that is an unduly harsh assessment, but BBS, IRC, Reddit and HN have all had their fair share of all that stuff.
> why did anyone invent the term "social media" 20 years after it had existed
Because back in the 90s the mainstream media had nothing to say about BBS and IRC so they didn't need a term for it.
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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…
The BBC has to prove it's serving the entire UK. An anonymous RSS doesn't allow that. It's frustrating, but it's also inevitable from such a hostile environment.
The real problem is that the BBC must be in a position whereby, should the government decide to link TV license and BBC access in a hard way, or (god forbid) fully privatise the service, they can flip a switch and make it so. So everything has to be behind a registration wall.
They have been under 13 years of pressure from Tory governments, run by friends of Murdoch, who don't believe in free knowledge and public broadcasting; the BBC had to be seen to go in the general direction of preparing for de-facto privatisation. This is the result.
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Inevitable in that people in charge of the BBC want to prove that people (specifically an appropriate cross-section of the British public) use the BBC to keep the funding secure
They could do that by entering the 21st century and having an IP-locked subscription system.
You clearly never worked in an ISP.
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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)
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see comment below. you are wrong no matter how nerdy your logic.
I'm just here for the spectacle of someone using the "you are nerdy, therefore wrong" argument on hacker news, of all places.
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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.
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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.
mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?
I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'll assume it's flawless. The issue is that it doesn't address the broader problem. Like the "official" iPhone app that has a giant, colorful "Join mastodon.social" button above a transparent "Pick another server" option, it serves to push people toward m.s and away from a good federated experience.
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mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?
Mainly that it only benefits giant instances. That's a convenient feature for people on a tiny instance following users on mastodon.social, but adds friction for users on mastodon.social who want to follow users on a tiny instance. I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'll assume it's flawless. The issue is that it doesn't address the broader problem. Like the "official" iPhone app that has a giant, colorful "…
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Mainly that it only benefits giant instances. That's a convenient feature for people on a tiny instance following users on mastodon.social, but adds friction for users on mastodon.social who want to follow users on a tiny instance. I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'll assume it's flawless. The issue is that it doesn't address the broader problem. Like the "official" iPhone app that has a giant, colorful "…
I’m not sure I grasp the argument here. No feature should be switched on until all 23,000 servers have updated to the necessary version?
It's not about having the necessary version. The feature has to be cookie driven, right? Otherwise, mastodon.social wouldn't be able to remember that an unauthenticated visitor has an account elsewhere. Such a cookie almost certainly won't be available across servers (thanks, ad trackers for ruining it for everyone). That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit.
Think of it this way: suppose a user visits a tiny Mastodon server at social.example.com. They click a user's follow button. How will social.example.com know to redirect the user to the home instance they configured when they visited mastodon.social?
> If I’ve downloaded the Mastodon app without having a server in mind what is the app supposed to do, just list them all?
If someone clicks the "pick another server" option, they're taken to a perfectly serviceable chooser. That should have been the default. It works for all the other apps that don't default to mastodon.social.