171–180 of 188 posts
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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.
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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.
I don't think it's that. 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…
I think they missed a trick by not getting into the open HDMI dongle market, letting companies like Amazon take the initiative. We now see the result of those non-open platforms (amazon taking 30% of income as a platform provider etc), but with government interference as it is (remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC building an international streaming service back in 2009) I can see why.
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.
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
BAHHAHAHAHAHA
Sorry, I forget that some haven't been quite as close to the blast radius of govermental/enterprise IT projects as others to know that "just implement" is a hilarious statement to make.
However much "cleaner/better" a direct integration with the beeb's CMS would be, it is not going to happen on the timescale needed for what is by their own statement, an R&D project.
Spinning up an instance for a few months, is not perfect, it's good enough.
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They could do that by entering the 21st century and having an IP-locked subscription system.
Because every house has a single, unchangeable IP...? You clearly never worked in an ISP.
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They could do that by entering the 21st century and having an IP-locked subscription system.
Enforced by a proprietary app?
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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...
1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account
2. Opening up their home instance
3. Going to the terrible search menu
4. Pasting the identifying string of the instance
5. Hoping the search doesn't bug out
6. Clicking follow and hoping the request doesn't bug out and remain in pending for months (yes, this happens)
Instead of the process on 'traditional' social media which is:
1. Click the big shiny button
Why they haven't yet fixed this glaring UX flaw using something like URL protocols is astonishing. I guess this is why technical people shouldn't design products. Nobody cares how it is built if it offers only friction to the end user.
Seeing this some non technical people will try out this Mastodon thing. If they can get past the initial hassle of choosing an instance to sign on they will try to 'Follow' the BBC account on the social.bbc instance, only to be greeted by this user friendly process: 1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account 2. Opening up their home instance 3. Going to the terrible search menu 4. Pasting the ide…
Granted, there are a lot of rough edges around the UX of Mastodon but pasting a url into a form field is at worst mildly annoying.