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The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#181

Post by didntcheck »

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…

I'm surprised they even have those feeds at all. I presumed their days were numbered when Sounds came out. It's not just them, a lot of podcasts seem to really not want you to use their plain old RSS feed, instead hiding it behind collapsable segments and similar. I guess they get more metrics (and maybe money) if you use Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever. Then of course there are the ones with outright exclusivity deals

It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority

I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#182

Post by didntcheck »

toyg wrote: post #153
ta1243 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They really jumped the shark when they made you have to sign in to the BBC News app. I uninstalled it and just decided to use my browser, and guess what, I now read the BBC less, so well done. But then I know I'm not the typical person on the street, so unfortunately this probably did yield a lot of new sign ups, under duress

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#183

Post by toyg »

robertlagrant wrote: post #174
toyg wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because every house has a single, unchangeable IP...? You clearly never worked in an ISP.

I definitely did not work at an ISP. But what I said doesn't require a static IP per house. Just GeoIP so non-UK residents are treated differently (unless they VPN).

The target is not to determine whether the client is in the UK, but whether the client is a specific license-payer or at a specific address. GeoIP doesn't help to get either of those datapoints.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#184

Post by toyg »

ta1243 wrote: post #172
toyg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The BBC has a history of fighting that -- when ITV Digital collapsed, the BBC was quickly out of the gates to get DTT decoders with no CAM modules as the norm. 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 inte…

> remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC

A New Labour government run by friends of Murdoch. You can guess the constant there.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#186

Post by merdaverse »

krapp wrote: post #180
merdaverse wrote: post #179

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…

Plenty of non-technical people have already succeeded at trying Mastodon out, and the process for following people outside of your instance, while awkward, doesn't seem to be the impossible hassle some make it out to be. 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.

My point is: if Mastodon can't get something as basic as an interaction with posts frictionless, I am skeptical that it can solve the more complicated problems, like profile migrations, discoverability, data retention etc.

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#187

Post by pschuegr »

kstrauser wrote: post #163
calgarymicro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 featu…

really this should be implemented as a browser extension...

Re: The BBC on Mastodon

#188

Post by egypturnash »

wiml wrote: post #128
egypturnash wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That used to be what I used social media for, but Twitter lost its utility for that sometime in the early 2010s.

Yeah pretty much. It turned into an Outrage Machine, because that makes more money. I started running a Mastodon for myself and some friends in the mid-2010s and it's been really nice.
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