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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#161

Post by jeroenhd »

nightpool wrote: post #114
jeroenhd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Authorized fetch is just one lever to pull in the massive moderation machine that Mastodon offers. On its own it's not very useful, but together with decent configuration it can help against scammers impersonating accounts on your server from a similar domain. Twitter is full of people who replicate other accounts and add random racist shit for some obscure reason (a deep grudge? Mental illness?) and without authorized fetch you'll have no way to effectively block such scrapers.

Enabling authorised fetch breaks federation with several other servers and some apps as well. Previously valid post IDs may suddenly become unavailable or break, which some services trying to backfill posts absolutely cannot deal with.

I believe actors are available as barebones actor information not to break federation completely, but I don't believe this type of compatibility is available for individual statuses.

Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't enable the setting on my own servers because the extra control it provides is probably worth it for the few exotic broken servers out there, but it's a gotcha if you expect the protocol to work as described in the spec alone.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#162

Post by calgarymicro »

kstrauser wrote: post #160
afavour wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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 t…

> That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit

It looks like you're correct; I went looking and found that https://universeodon.com had the new feature as well, and I had to type in my home server URL again. I actually thought this was a great solution before I realized you'd have to do it for every server; hopefully they find a better solution for this.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#163

Post by kstrauser »

calgarymicro wrote: post #162
kstrauser wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit It looks like you're correct; I went looking and found that https://universeodon.com had the new feature as well, and I had to type in my home server URL again. I actually thought this was a great solution before I realized you'd have to do it for every server; hopefully they find a better solution for this.

If it worked that way, I'd support it completely! I think the idea is great. I just don't think it can be implemented in a cross-instance way, short of having some sort of central server.

With the feature the way it is today, it makes it a little easier to follow users on mastodon.social, and a little harder to follow users anywhere else. Suppose that hypothetical social.example.com instance has 1 user. If that feature's enabled on the server, anyone wanting to follow that 1 person has to complete that extra step with zero benefit. It's only useful for larger instances, benefitting the few centralized servers without helping the federation as a whole.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#164

Post by [deleted] »

zokier wrote: post #121
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…

> 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. Mastodon imho desperately needs proper multi-tenancy, i.e. bring your own domain, separate handles, some settings customization, without needing to run whole another instance of the server. We already found out in the 90s that vhosting is useful f…

[deleted]

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#166

Post by hadrien01 »

zerkten wrote: post #74
hadrien01 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Radio France generate revenues in other French-speaking countries with the same content? It feels like the BBC is trying to maximise revenue but expectations for consumers locally and overseas are going to be very different. Blocking loopholes hurts the local users more.

French public broadcasters are ad-supported, they don't have to separate local and overseas websites/apps/revenue logic. I've seen another comment about the BBC having ads for other BBC content; I already get ads in my Radio France podcasts (just the one before the proper content), and they're dynamic, so they surely change them depending on where you listening to maximize revenue. Probably the same type of dynamic advertising I get when listening to US podcasts with inverted French-speaking ads.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#167

Post by [deleted] »

uhtred wrote: post #156
wiml wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just here for the spectacle of someone using the "you are nerdy, therefore wrong" argument on hacker news, of all places.

you're here for the upvotes and validation that your comment was witty

[deleted]

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#168

Post by kalleboo »

uhtred wrote: post #55
zichy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realize that a forum is social media?

No it's not, forums were around on the internet long before the term "social media" existed. Same with comments on a newspaper article, they are not social media.

The term "social media" was coined in 1997 in reference to AOL chatrooms. It can totally apply to web forums as well.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#169

Post by fomine3 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #137
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 >…

Technically it only supports http in spec https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29985571/w3c-validator-s...

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#170

Post by stefandesu »

versteck wrote: post #83
chefandy wrote: post #50

Anybody considering ActivityPub for a general-audience social media project should give the challenges section a close read with an open mind and not reflexively minimize the negative parts of their experience. Before the big spike at the end of 2022, critiquing Mastodon's usability was tantamount to heresy in the FOSS crowd. Oddly, that didn't change much after many (most?) of those new users dropped Mastodon in the…

The answer to that is https://elk.zone atm, a fun and chef's kiss interface (built with nuxt). You can insert elk.zone/ before any Mastodon url. https://phanpy.social is also great, with multi columns even for lists. A browser plugin like https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplif... to follow, favorite, etc. directly on any server has also improved my experience a lot.

Honest question about Elk (and I guess all other web clients): How do people use it when it doesn't remember your timeline position? When I open my Mastodon client, I want it to be where I left it, not at the top of the timeline. Maybe it's becoming unusual to be a timeline completionist, but I can only use clients that reliably remember my timeline position.
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