BBC is testing being on Mastodon

[abarbarian]

BBC is testing being on Mastodon, says fediverse better fit for public purposes than Twitter or Threads

 

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Writing about the move in the blog post, Tristan Ferne, of BBC Research & Development, said it’s taken the decision to experiment with distributed and decentralized social media because it sees the fediverse more naturally aligning with the BBC’s public service purposes.

“The principles of the Fediverse, with an emphasis on local control, quality content, and social value, are far more aligned with our public purposes than those of avowedly commercial networks like Threads or Twitter,” he writes.

 

 

The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media

 

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Federated social networks, or the Fediverse, offer a model for future development that aligns with our own work to support a public service internet and our previous work on decentralised data. The principles of the Fediverse, with an emphasis on local control, quality content, and social value, are far more aligned with our public purposes than those of avowedly commercial networks like Threads or Twitter. Other public service and non-profit organisations already have a presence there, from the Dutch government to Wikimedia to the EU.

 

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@BBCRD@social.bbc

@BBC5Live@social.bbc

@BBCRadio4@social.bbc

@BBCTaster@social.bbc

@Connected_Studio@social.bbc

@BBC_News_Labs@social.bbc

 

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If you have a Mastodon account already, then please follow us - https://social.bbc/@BBCRD - and let us know what you think. If you don’t, then you can learn more about joining Mastodon.

 

Good move by the Beeb. They need to do more PR work if they want it to take off though.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Meh... I've resisted the urge to "test" Mastodon. I'm happy with my boring old Diaspora for now.

[securitybreach]

Neat

 

I have a mastodon account but I never got used to the layout.

[abarbarian]

I have not joined either of them as I find it all a tad confusing. Which server top join what to follow etc etc. I do not do FaceBook or Whats app or nowt like that either. Bit of a luddite really. OP was just to fly the flag for the beeb. Long live the Queen an all that. 

[securitybreach]

I had signed up at https://mastodon.social which is the original server.

[securitybreach]

5 minutes ago, abarbarian said:

I have not joined either of them as I find it all a tad confusing. Which server top join what to follow etc etc. I do not do FaceBook or Whats app or nowt like that either. Bit of a luddite really. OP was just to fly the flag for the beeb. Long live the Queen an all that. 

 

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It can be tempting to compare Mastodon directly with Twitter, which on one level makes sense. Both are microblogging platforms where people can follow your posts, both have “like” buttons and allow you to share content, and both allow you to follow other people’s posts. But this isn’t a perfect analogy.

First, as I said, Mastodon isn’t a company—it’s a piece of open source software with a community built around it. That software, in turn, is built around ActivityPub, a protocol that several other apps can also interface with.

This sounds boring as hell, I’ll grant you that, but it really isn’t. Every major social networking site, at this point, is basically a place to share screenshots from other social networking sites. Twitter is full of Reddit screenshots; Instagram is full of Twitter screenshots. This is an objectively stupid situation, but it’s happening because it’s not currently possible to share posts from one platform on another.

This is where the Fediverse comes in. Imagine if Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were all part of a broader network, and you could do things like follow an Instagram account on Twitter or reply to a YouTube comment on Facebook.

This is how the Fediverse works.....

 

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-get-started-use-mastodon/

[Corrine]

6 minutes ago, securitybreach said:

I have a mastodon account but I never got used to the layout.

Same here.

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Yes, Mastodon definitely has a "busy" interface. That turned me off, also.