[HN Gopher] The BBC on Mastodon
___________________________________________________________________
The BBC on Mastodon
Author : _han
Score : 367 points
Date : 2023-07-31 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| sdfghswe wrote:
| I like the diagram on their page. Anyone here tried GnuSocial?
| What about bookwyrm? I searched "intelligent investor" (found)
| and "empower your investing" (not found).
|
| One problem I have with decentralization (and this is almost a
| nitpick) is how complex the mental model of those things are. Who
| decides which books exist on Bookwyrm? Who stores the reviews?
| etc etc. It's quite exhausting actually.
|
| I'm sure once one "wins" and you get used to it it's not an
| issue, but I think this friction is an issue for adoption.
| input_sh wrote:
| Same as any other book tracker (Goodreads or whatever): if the
| book isn't already there, you can add it yourself. You can also
| import it from other BookWyrm instances or from OpenLibrary.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| Ironic really given that most of the rest of the BBC dedicates
| hours of airtime every week to denigrating social media ([1][2]
| etc. etc.) because the BBC are so desperate to maintain relevance
| in a era where (shock horror) you can actually find good quality
| unbiased content on the internet.
|
| Modern traditional media is barely any better than social media
| these days anyway. It ranges from blatantly biased (e.g. Daily
| Mail, Telegraph) to the BBC which is only unbiased when it suits
| them. Just as you can't believe everything you read on the
| internet, you can't believe everything the BBC tells you either
| (assuming they even bother to tell you in the first place ....
| see their silence about Michelle Mone and PPE for example, the
| BBC were silent when the story was reported in full everywhere
| else).
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jqjcj [2]
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRv...
| rvz wrote:
| > Just as you can't believe everything you read on the
| internet, you can't believe everything the BBC tells you either
| (assuming they even bother to tell you in the first place ....
| see their silence about Michelle Mone and PPE for example, the
| BBC were silent when the story was reported in full everywhere
| else).
|
| Absolutely spot on.
|
| No idea why you are downvoted over this. It is for everyone's
| one's own good that you should not straight-up believe whatever
| news source says. There was a story in the UK which the BBC
| finally apologized [0] for spreading inaccuracies of a
| politician who was de-banked over his views.
|
| You have links substantiating your comment(s) and yet you are
| being downvoted for just stating the internet's own proverb of
| being skeptical on whatever you read on the internet.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/24/bbc-
| writes-...
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| Really you have no idea? Maybe because it's off topic?
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| How is it ironic? Their Mastodon instance is private and
| basically read-only, not social media.
|
| I don't think this is the thread best suited for excreting your
| obvious pent-up anger
| flumpcakes wrote:
| I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable
| than "new media" when they lie.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I guess the difference is "old media" is held more
| accountable than "new media" when they lie.
|
| Except they are not.
|
| It is amazing, for example, how many times the BBC
| conveniently fails to correctly attribute an interviewee.
|
| So many times somebody is given a generic job title when they
| are actually working for a political lobby organisation for
| example.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| > Except they are not.
|
| In what way is new media more accountable?
|
| It seems the vast majority of Twitter accounts spew lies.
| In the last few years it seems to have become even worse
| for social media.
|
| I can write a complaint to the BBC for them to run a
| retraction, social media embraces the division and lies
| because the platform is not responsible for the content.
|
| I cannot envision at all how someone would consider old
| media less accountable than new media.
| monooso wrote:
| You clearly have your own pre-existing gripes with the BBC,
| which have very little to do with this story.
| rvz wrote:
| [flagged]
| Kye wrote:
| Mastodon is software. It doesn't platform anything any more
| than nginx or Libreoffice do. If you know of something like
| this on the two official instances, be sure to hit the report
| button.
| danschuller wrote:
| I'm cheered to see any wider adoption of mastodon. For my very
| niche game engine developer follows Mastodon is now almost as
| good as twitter was but for mainstream or other niche interests
| it's got a ways to go.
| jrmg wrote:
| As I follow these new accounts, I'm reminded of just how _hard_
| it is to follow people on other servers on Mastodon.
|
| Click follow -> dialog full of text, which gives the most common
| instructions (to copy and paste into the search field on your
| server) in smaller text at the end -> go to my server -> there's
| no search field, or anything that says 'search' -> [I know that
| this is because my window is too narrow] -> expand the window ->
| paste into the revealed search field -> click 'follow' on the
| result -> Phew!
|
| Now I have to do this again for the other accounts...
|
| I'm absolutely sure people become lost and give up at every step
| here.
| barathr wrote:
| That's just on the web interface -- all the apps make it much
| easier.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Hopefully we'll see browser integration eventually
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| Federations are the worst way to implement decentralization.
| All because people are afraid of blockchains.
| regularjack wrote:
| Right, it's only because of fear that blockchains aren't used
| for this use case, there are no other differences whatsoever.
| treyd wrote:
| On Mastodon's interface if you see a foreign post locally on
| your timeline can see the poster's profile from there and
| follow it there. But all this is really a limitation of the web
| interfaces. There's extensions to assist with this process and
| desktop and mobile clients don't have this issue at all.
| pakyr wrote:
| 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 is now click
| follow -> click 'Take me home' -> click follow again. Still not
| great, but a lot better than it was.
|
| Example: https://i.imgur.com/MG1d5kV.jpg
| riffic wrote:
| 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.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| 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
| Kye wrote:
| That could be coming, but it's probably easier to get the
| approval and funding to start a Mastodon instance and start
| learning for when/if they go further than to bolt on new
| functionality to the CMS.
| rsynnott wrote:
| If you want an off-the-shelf ActivityPub thing, a Mastodon
| instance is arguably one of the paths of less resistance.
| thedaly wrote:
| I imagine that the twitter clone aspect is a big part of the
| overall appeal. Journalists are used to Twitter, as are
| consumers of news content.
| sickill wrote:
| I fully agree with you, although this is still step in the
| right direction compared to them sticking to Twitter/FB/etc.
| mattmoose21 wrote:
| I imagine they use it to give employees accounts that they
| can manage. If I was a journalist at the bbc I could get an
| account on their instance and the bbc could manage
| verification and account management.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| But Mastodon is not the only way to manage accounts and
| publish stuff. It has so much overhead because it has to
| look and behave like a Twitter clone, whereas you could
| simply have a barebones password protected web admin panel
| to allow each journalist to publish with their BBC-approved
| credentials.
| egypturnash wrote:
| With an entire Mastodon installation, then each
| journalist can also keep up with and talk to sources via
| a Twitter-like interface. Though they will quickly want
| to move any serious conversations with information
| sources elsewhere what with the big undismissable "hey
| this is NOT REALLY PRIVATE" sign at the top of the
| "private" messages column.
|
| Also I suspect that "what if we just set up a Masto and
| see how it goes" might be a much smaller investment then
| "add AP to our CMS". They're only committing to six
| months of this right now.
| [deleted]
| j_maffe wrote:
| I'm unsure how much overhead there is since the service
| discussed above is functionally a micro-blogging service.
| Also I think you're missing on the important feature of
| having an easily recognized format (even if it is a
| clone)
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 requirement,
| but if you don't do it then parts of the Fediverse won't be
| able to follow you. There are also expectations attached to
| certain activities that aren't in the spec but will confuse
| people on most other servers.
|
| The easiest solution I came up with was to run a server that
| already does all of the hard work (gotosocial, Mastodon, etc)
| and call its API to add new posts.
| nightpool wrote:
| "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 don't do it then parts of the Fediverse won't be able
| to follow you."
|
| I don't think this is true even when using
| AUTHORIZED_FETCH, Mastodon still displays the minimum set
| of Actor information necessary to complete a follow request
| (public key, username, etc), so I don't really know what
| this part of the post might be referring to.
| exitb wrote:
| So the only way to see the posts and interactions on the web
| would be via other instances?
| riffic wrote:
| I run a wordpress instance that also federates to the
| ActivityPub ecosystem with a plugin. You can navigate
| directly to my site to see my posts and I imagine anyone
| else's CMS can do that too with the right protocol enabled.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| mastodon is the new mirc or kleenex
| atchoo wrote:
| 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 topical comedy a month out
| of date... which is just weird.
| drcongo wrote:
| Every time I hear the BBC Sounds jingle - "Music, radio,
| podcasts" - I think of the show W1A where they referred to the
| the "Department for Culture, Media and Sport" as the
| "Department for Culture, Media and For Some Reason Sport".
|
| "Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more
| fitting.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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 > 1.rss printf 'GET
| /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost:
| podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
| |openssl s_client -connect 125.252.212.113:443 -ign_eof > 1.rss
| Zhyl wrote:
| I have get_iplayer [0] set up to download the topical comedy as
| it comes out and put it into a Podcast addict virtual podcast
| folder. Suits my needs.
|
| I would use Sounds, but the UI is actually really fiddly to get
| to where I need to go, you can "subscribe" but you can't have
| playlists or queues. It's just a bit rubbish all round.
|
| [0] https://get-iplayer.github.io/get_iplayer/
| roywiggins wrote:
| I ended up rube-goldberging get_iplayer outputs into a proper
| podcast feed and thence into Pocket Casts with the rest of my
| podcasts. It sort of mostly works.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There seems to have been a political attack against BBC comedy,
| which honestly was doing great work at raising awareness of
| political mischief and helping to shine a light on government
| wrongdoing and corruption.
|
| The killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that
| free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news
| cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management
| has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks.
|
| In Our Time is an absolute _tour de force_. Bragg just brings
| such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of
| subjects. It 's a delight to follow along in the wake of him
| and his guests.
| petepete wrote:
| While I agree the delay is a killer for topical news/comedy
| content, it's hard to argue the same for In Our Time. In Our
| Time is the only show I regularly listen to in podcast form.
| roywiggins wrote:
| In recent weeks they've started inserting interstitial ads
| for other BBC content at random points inside In Our Time.
|
| "How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45
| minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it
| at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a
| sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I don't know if this applies to your circumstance, but
| w.r.t. those m3u8 urls posted elsewhere: I have found that
| _a lot_ of systems will cheerfully reference the ad-break
| content on some rando spammy looking domain in the middle
| of their otherwise sane #EXTM3U format making it cheap to
| just block them and the player skips over it
|
| My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make
| the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up
| the content stream
| atchoo wrote:
| For IoT the one actual pain-point is that if an episode
| generates online discussion then I can't participate but it's
| mainly a complaint about the user-hostile attempt to make the
| podcast feed an inferior second class citizen.
|
| It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the
| digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb
| aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use
| their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would
| they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad
| really.
| robga wrote:
| I agree with the angst. It's a very weird approach. For
| podcasts like In Our Time or The Life Scientific, episodes are
| timeless. After the the initial 4 week blip, I now just listen
| as they become available. The delay is invisible. I don't get
| how the 4 week delay benefits the BBC.
|
| My biggest grip though is for items from BBC News Labs
| https://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/
|
| They almost never open source anything despite being heavily
| funded by public money. They won't even release Breaking News
| push headlines to FOI requests.
| noneeeed wrote:
| 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 obsession with control has soured my feelings
| towards BBC radio.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's about as self-conscious as you can get, too. You already
| have an audience for the entertainment products you produce.
| Out of all the places where you can sneak in a "value add,"
| this is not one of them. As if you're going to out-produce
| your own creators.
|
| It's audio only entertainment. Just.. go with _that_.
| ta1243 wrote:
| 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.
| alexsereno wrote:
| "Inevitable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this
| comment
| ta1243 wrote:
| 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
| robertlagrant wrote:
| They could do that by entering the 21st century and
| having an IP-locked subscription system.
| Evidlo wrote:
| How does that get them subscription estimates?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| No; inevitable is a claim, not a support.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| 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.
| zerkten wrote:
| 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.
| squarefoot wrote:
| The Rock feed by Radio France is among my favorites online
| music radios. I don't use smartphones and don't like to
| keep a browser running just to listen to music, so I
| extracted the URL and use it into whichever player I have
| available.
|
| https://stream.radiofrance.fr/fiprock/fiprock_hifi.m3u8
| zerkten wrote:
| I don't follow the BBC's approaches to revenue generation
| that closely, but is part of this due to larger overseas
| audiences? I'm now living outside the UK, so I expect that
| I'm viewed differently as a user by the Beeb, as well as by
| TV licence payers. If access to content isn't controlled then
| it's harder to maximise the revenue.
|
| BBC Sounds feels like it's part of that efforts, but I'd be
| interested to know more given how much family members
| complain about the costs of licencing and services relative
| to the quality.
| [deleted]
| yung_steezy wrote:
| I actually quite like BBC sounds but it is completely possible
| to circumvent it. You might need to look the URL of a show up
| on there but you can play any show on sounds using `mpv <URL>`
|
| I also use that method to listen to live radio:
| alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/
| audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8'
| alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto
| /audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8'
| alias bbc2='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/
| audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_two.m3u8'
| alias bbc3='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/
| audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_three.m3u8'
| alias bbc4='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/
| audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8'
| alias bbc5='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/
| audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live.m3u8'
| alias bbc5x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto
| /audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live_sports_
| extra.m3u8' alias bbc6='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co
| .uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc
| _6music.m3u8'
| ajb wrote:
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| 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)
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| The much-missed Beeb-O-Tron[0] used to have a function to
| do this called the "Beebobodge"[1], given any timeslot in
| the week. Nowadays I use Radiofeeds[2] to get live URL
| stream links which I play through Transmission on Android
| or VLC on PC.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100402115118/http://beebo
| tron....
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100408073914/http://beebo
| tron....
|
| [2] http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/
| Affric wrote:
| Me too.
|
| From Brexit to ruining IoT was when I decided I would no longer
| consider myself British. My citizenship is just be a piece of
| trivia now.
| rsynnott wrote:
| There are multiple BBCs; the commercial arm ruins everything.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I hope it doesn't get killed by CSAM spam or stuff like that from
| trolls.
|
| Automated federated filtering is not impossible. In fact, an
| distributed setup (where volunteers host image/text classifiers)
| like AI Horde already does seems pretty doable.
| JdeBP wrote:
| Unlikely. The BBC would be very daft to run an open-signup
| server. And a closed-signup server would only have the problems
| that BBC employees themselves bring.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| But won't replies from other servers show up on the BBC's
| page if they post something?
| JdeBP wrote:
| Not necessarily, no.
|
| There's a whole long standing organization of sysops
| dedicated to silencing and blocking the (few, I've never
| even _heard_ of one myself) places on the WWW that the sort
| of stuff that you are talking about would come from. If the
| BBC sysops are on the ball, they 'll already be looking at
| what block lists to subscribe to.
|
| In fact, they've had the system up since June, and I
| wouldn't be surprised that they haven't already been
| importing blocklists. Alas, the "about" page doesn't say,
| as it normally would, what servers are moderated. But I can
| understand why the BBC would not want to get into the silly
| game that would (and does) result if it did publish its
| moderation list.
|
| It's not well publicized, and resources for new sysops
| being poor is one of the problems with Mastodon et al., but
| I hope that the BBC people are on the ball in this respect.
|
| * https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-
| social-...
| zeeZ wrote:
| I clicked on their federated timeline and the first thing
| I saw was a post from someone named "horsefucker thicc".
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > There's a whole long standing organization of sysops
| dedicated to silencing and blocking the (few, I've never
| even heard of one myself) places on the WWW that the sort
| of stuff that you are talking about would come from.
|
| I was thinking more along the lines of subreddit trolls,
| who will come in and spam shock/csam images trying to
| bait the mods, not actual CSAM distributors with known
| IPs or whatever.
|
| The BBC will certainly attract that kind of internet
| denizen. They would have to have employees (or automated
| system) staring at their post replies constantly,
| watching for this kind of stuff.
| JdeBP wrote:
| The FediVerse doesn't work that way. There is no "the"
| mods.
|
| The people posting this stuff won't be posting to the
| BBC. They will be posting to far away places each with
| _their own_ moderators. They 'll either get suppressed at
| the source, by _those_ moderators, as complaints come in
| (which they will probably do quite rapidly); or it will
| get around that those far away places don 't moderate,
| and the far away places will get silenced and blocked and
| make it onto the aforementioned lists, meaning that the
| (civilized) world won't pull _any_ posts from them.
|
| The reporting system, bear in mind, reports to the
| _origin_ server, which won 't be the BBC. If I, for
| example, see an unacceptable post in reply to something
| posted by the BBC, my report doesn't get seen by anyone
| at the BBC. It gets seen by my local sysop and the sysop
| of the origin node.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Hm. Interesting, thanks for elaborating.
|
| If spamming smurf accounts on the reputable instances is
| hard enough, I guess this isn't an issue.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| TFA says:
|
| > Unlike most Mastodon servers where you can sign up for a
| personal account, we're only using this instance to host BBC
| accounts; it's a place for us to publish in the Fediverse. If
| you have a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub) account from another
| server, then you can easily follow our accounts.
|
| So if there's CSAM, it's coming from the BBC itself, which is
| hopefully unlikely.
|
| And the fediverse / Mastodon already takes care of filtering.
| Niche instances failing to police CSAM are defederated by
| mainstream instances, which means they're unreachable to anyone
| on the mainstream instances. This could be improved and
| automation tools for use by moderators are certainly welcome,
| but generally speaking as a user you're not going to see
| objectionable content unless you go looking for it or your
| admin is negligent.
|
| edit: typo
| firecall wrote:
| Do systems like Mastodon break the promise of Social Networks?
|
| In practice Mastodon doesn't seem to support the ability to
| actually be social.
|
| I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it
| opened in Safari.
|
| I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn't as I wasn't
| logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn't my
| instance.
|
| I'd then have needed to copy the post URL, login to my instance,
| and share it or do whatever you have to do in Mastodon. I moved
| onto other things, the process broke my flow.
|
| The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be
| actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is
| that It'll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small
| number of major instances.
|
| An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might
| not. Running a Social Network is hard.
| chefandy wrote:
| 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 subsequent months. There
| is clearly a disconnect between what Mastodon offers, and what
| general, non-technical audiences want it to offer.
|
| ActivityPub and Mastodon are both _fucking awesome_ , and I'm
| confident the Fediverse can support a social media tool painless
| enough for grandpa to confidently migrate his fly-fishing
| discussion group to from his Facebook group. I'm also sure all of
| the good work folks are doing on the existing tool set will still
| be valuable in that world; but it's probably not going to be the
| thing that makes decentralized social media the standard rather
| than a distant fringe alternative to most non-technical folks.
| I've got my eye on Bluesky but I'd really love to see someone
| figure out a way to tighten things up non-commercially. I've
| tried digging into the problem a few times, but the conceptual
| simplicity of centralized social media is a huge selling point
| for regular folks.
| versteck wrote:
| 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.
| chefandy wrote:
| Elk.zone looks cool and is definitely a nice face for
| Mastodon-- glad to know about it!
|
| However, the disconnect between non-technical users and what
| Mastodon offers is far deeper than the timeline layout and
| interactions. If users must practically understand how to
| negotiate federation to satisfy their _most basic_
| requirement-- nearly effortlessly finding and interacting
| with their friends, family and other sources within the
| interface-- then it 's a non-starter for that crowd.
|
| Most developers seem not to realize a) how much more
| resistance dealing with the practical complexity of
| federation adds for non-technical users trying to do what
| they want to do, and b) how little resistance those users
| will tolerate to achieve their goals when they have free
| options. As it stands, the cost/benefit ratio to switching to
| Mastodon is not even in the ballpark of what it needs to be
| for nearly any social media user. Mastodon's huge active user
| base fluctuation 5-10 mos ago comprises about half a percent
| of Twitter's active monthly user base, which entirely leaves
| out Facebook, Instagram, Etc... and most of Mastodon's new
| ex-twitter users left.
| brewdad wrote:
| It's nice to see an organization like the BBC willing to
| experiment with alternative ideas. For those unaware, they also
| put their news web site on the onion network.
|
| https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...
| reaperducer wrote:
| If that's what you're into, the New York Times has been on Tor
| Onion for six years:
|
| https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...
|
| https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york...
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Interesting fact - the BBC has always been around experimenting
| with new media etc - in the early days of ISPs in the UK, the BBC
| was one of the first and in fact had the best (ie carried the
| most newsgroups) UseNet server from a UK based ISP at the time.
| ta1243 wrote:
| BBC ran public multicast trials for live streaming back in 2006
| -- https://www.bbc.co.uk/multicast/
|
| Alas didn't go anywhere. Now nearly 20 years later many
| companies (amazon, netflix, bbc) still struggle with live
| streaming at scale
| Barrin92 wrote:
| and not just new media either. They also sold about a million
| BBC Micros. In the early 80s most British schools had one. The
| British public system has produced a lot of pretty cool tech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
| darreninthenet wrote:
| Yup I grew up with one of those, my dad got some bonus at
| work and bought a BBC Micro B (with a 5.25" floppy drive,
| gasp!) when I was 7 and it was my first encounter with a
| computer... and then he got the (original) Elite game and I
| was hooked on computers ever since
| lttlrck wrote:
| We also got a model B when my dad got a bonus (he was away
| for weeks during the miners' strike of '84) but we had a
| Radio Shack tape recorder [1] - not a floppy drive!
|
| Some years later we went to a store to buy a floppy drive
| but I ended up with an Atari ST instead. For not a lot more
| money...
|
| [1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/57/59/b15759f5425af9f
| 2f650...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Sadly, years ago they tossed their massive, intricate website
| that was filled with goodies (you could even download _study
| guides_ for documentaries they broadcast years ago, or go
| through their _citations_ ), replaced it with a modern nothing,
| and hid their streams behind crappy apps.
| yung_steezy wrote:
| Product owners eventually do this to every tech platform to
| justify their existence
| londons_explore wrote:
| Anyone got graphs of Twitter/X active users Vs
| mastodon/activitypub active users??
|
| Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved
| back to twitter.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Firstly, this is so wonderful that they're trying this
| experiment, and of course the information that they shared to
| both manage expectations as well as provide a mini-primer on what
| all this "mastodon" and "fediver" stuff really is....Really
| cool!!!
|
| Secondly, for being NOT an OG org. on the fediverse, i have to
| say that the BBC folks here really nailed the definiton of the
| Fediverse: "...the distributed collection of social networks
| known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications
| all linked together by common protocols. The most common software
| used in this area is Mastodon..." I acknowledge that some newbies
| might not care so much about naunce and correctness of some
| topics, but i believe it matters...and i am impressed that BBC
| did such a great job here. Cheers and good luck to BBC folks
| running this!
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| I didn't understand the need for the BBC to compete with other
| broadcasters until I realised they were just the government
| mouthpiece wrapped in shiny programming.
|
| Their moves into wider media, beyond TV and radio, are all about
| ensuring they can send their propaganda as far and as wide as
| possible, and nothing more.
| okasaki wrote:
| [flagged]
| EnglishmanITGuy wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| uhtred wrote:
| does social media serve any purpose whatsoever besides marketing
| and PR, virtue signalling and self promotion?
|
| honestly, what genuine use does something like twitter, mastodon,
| instagram etc have? No one even reads the shit other people post,
| they just use it to hook into their own material.
|
| fucking weird world we live in now, where 90% of the population
| appears to be a narcissist.
| peterlk wrote:
| Well, here I am replying to you on a social media platform (HN)
| to contribute to a discussion. So yes, social media does serve
| a purpose. It connects people and allows us to have
| discussions.
|
| The problem you mention is a huge one with modern social media,
| and I think that it is exacerbated by the perverse incentives
| of engagement (ad) driven monetization. But there are healthier
| ways to use social media, and shifting data ownership away from
| a centralized oligopoly to a federated, decentralized model is
| a step in the right direction
| uhtred wrote:
| Not really. HN is a forum.
| chikitabanana wrote:
| Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?
| uhtred wrote:
| common sense
| Karellen wrote:
| Is HN social media?
|
| I tend to distinguish social media from internet fora in
| that, social media is user-centric. You follow _people_. But
| a forum is topic-centric. You follow a discussion group with
| a specific purpose, and it 's an implementation detail if
| it's hosted on a dedicated website, or a mailing list, or a
| newsgroup, or a subreddit.
|
| HN could be alt.news.ycombinator, or /r/hackernews. It isn't
| @hackernews, or... whatever facebook does. I definitely lean
| towards thinking of HN as a forum, rather than a brand of
| social media.
|
| Do you think that's a meaningful distinction?
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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 any site that people use primarily to interact with
| others (in public, I guess) is arguably social media.
| (Looking forward to being savaged by HN pedants looking to
| reduce that definition to absurdity.)
| Karellen wrote:
| > 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 internet". Or, _shudder_ ,
| "information superhighway" if they really needed a hip
| slang moniker to use instead?
| trealira wrote:
| I'm not who you asked, but I agree, and I do think that's a
| meaningful distinction.
|
| I'm curious: how would you characterize Tumblr? It's true
| that you generally follow people, but it's unlike other
| social media in that: blogs are anonymous, people generally
| have multiple side blogs for different topics, and browsing
| through tags is just as common as scrolling your dashboard
| for content posted by blogs you follow.
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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 looks useless.
| wiml wrote:
| That used to be what I used social media for, but Twitter
| lost its utility for that sometime in the early 2010s.
| uhtred wrote:
| I have friends, but I guess I don't see the need to converse
| with them in public for all to see- why not use something
| private like whatsapp or signal? Why the need to show
| everyone else that you have friends?
|
| Do you post a status update telling all your "friends" that
| you stubbed your toe and then feel depressed when you don't
| get many heart emojis?
|
| Or do you post a really witty observation about something in
| the news, so witty you spent all morning thinking of it, and
| then get depressed when no one reposts it?
|
| sure though, you only use it to communicate with your
| friends.
| da02 wrote:
| Very true. There is some positive news. Most books could be
| said to be "trash", but book publishing is still important. The
| same was said with blogs: "Oh, most blogs are about people
| having breakfast." But, I remember Joel on Software,
| Scripting.com, LRC, and Mises Blog that all had such a positive
| effect on me. So it is with social media: - people are meeting
| and getting married via Instagram. - I have chatted with Ph.Ds
| on Twitter and Youtube, even though I have no college degree. -
| I helped a UI/UX designer have lunch with Alan Kay. All of it
| via Twitter. That is something that will never happen to me
| because I am not in the same "league". He later casually
| mentioned he had lunch with Ted Nelson. (Sigh! That will never
| happen to me.) - And lots of people here probably have an
| anecdote how one-thing-led-to-another that made life a little
| bit happier. Jeff Tucker would probably say, "It doesn't matter
| if 98% are narcissistic hunters/gathers. That 2% can change The
| World and Your Life." (Of course, you would say it more
| eloquently.)
|
| At least this is what I say to myself when I get depressed we
| are living in the 21st Century World and people care more about
| letting men inside women's bathrooms than the fact the US and
| its "allies" just bombed the Nordstream pipeline that will have
| a negative effect on millions of Europeans... and how I will be
| downvoted (2718 currently) for posting this. But, at least you
| are not alone "uhtred".
| polytely wrote:
| You are literally posting this complaint to a social media
| site.
|
| For me I'm on mastodon to shitpost, discuss media with friends,
| my account is locked and I only allow followers who give off
| good vibes. There is nothing narcistic about it, it isn't even
| tied to my IRL identity.
| uhtred wrote:
| Not really, HN is a forum.
| zichy wrote:
| Do you realize that a forum is social media?
| uhtred wrote:
| 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.
| DRW_ wrote:
| Just because the term "social media" came later and was
| popularised by certain kinds of social media networks, it
| doesn't mean it doesn't encompass regular old fashioned
| forums too.
|
| What is this right now other than a social interaction
| about a piece of media (the article)? This is a very
| arbitrary distinction for you to draw.
| uhtred wrote:
| see comment below. you are wrong no matter how nerdy your
| logic.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Ah, "everyone knows." The only argument that can't
| possibly work against anyone.
| uhtred wrote:
| I could replace "everyone knows" with "it's common sense"
| wiml wrote:
| I'm just here for the spectacle of someone using the "you
| are nerdy, therefore wrong" argument on hacker news, of
| all places.
| rsynnott wrote:
| "That's a cat." "No it's not, those were around long
| before the word 'cat' existed".
| uhtred wrote:
| [flagged]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| agree about the narcissism but for a news org, this is their
| RSS.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Always cool to see mainstream orgs get involved with the
| Fediverse and their explainer is good, but there is no way to
| ascertain what they will consider a successful experiment at the
| end of the six months. It leads me to believe there is a good
| chance the whole thing will be scrapped in a few months, which
| makes me less inclined to engage with it (which in turn increases
| the likelihood that it will be considered a failure, etc).
|
| I suppose it's better than _silently_ subjecting it to a six-
| month probation period, but I can 't imagine it is so expensive
| to maintain (and use as a mirror for their Twitter etc) that they
| need the probation period at all. And if in six months the BBC
| publicly pronounce that they don't see the value in Mastodon it
| will probably be a net negative for the Fediverse.
| dahwolf wrote:
| 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 barely anything to moderate. When a
| nutjob replies to your tweet, you're not responsible for it. Nor
| are you responsible for the handling of personal data of people
| replying. All of this is not your problem, which is nice.
|
| - For the time being, centralized social media has superior reach
| potential, not just because of the bigger audience potential,
| your account is also vastly easier to discover through search and
| algorithms. As an example, BBC world news has 40M followers on
| Twitter, whilst on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is
| exceptionally rare.
|
| - Federation/defederation wars may reduce your reach even
| further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it's
| typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a
| big thing on Mastodon.
|
| Bottom line is that you're adding operational and legal headaches
| with very little to show for it in comparison to the big
| networks.
| wiml wrote:
| The BBC isn't hosting anyone else on their instance (nor can I
| think of a reason they would want to). As I understand it it's
| just a way for their activity to be visible on the fediverse.
| That should make their infra costs minimal; they don't have
| moderation of comments/replies; and federation/defederation
| wars will only affect the specific other instances which choose
| to defederate from the BBC. Your third point is valid but
| that's why this is an experiment.
| dahwolf wrote:
| You may want to read the actual article which explains how
| replies very much end up on their instance and therefore
| require moderation. They will 100% host all replies + all
| media attached to it. That's how federation works.
|
| Yes, defederation is per instance but cuts of all users of
| that instance from BBC. Here's a fresh example:
|
| https://social.anoxinon.de/@Curator@mastodon.art/11080988949.
| ..
|
| Pretty large instance that defederated before BBC even
| started.
| mlindner wrote:
| > on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is
| exceptionally rare.
|
| I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon. Are
| there actually accounts with more than 100K followers? If so
| who?
| buildfocus wrote:
| Creator of Mastodon has 330k. Not sure if he's #1 but he's a
| strong contender: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron
|
| EDIT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1cpUKkoT1MUn
| 8_xM4... has a list of the big ones, looks like
| https://mastodon.social/mastodon is top at 800k.
|
| > I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon
|
| https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats says currently 2
| million active monthly users, 9 million registered. That's
| just for Mastodon, so add another couple of million for the
| rest of the Fediverse.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Mastodon has more than 10 million... but a lot of these are
| probably duplicated, bots, etc. Active users are about 1.7
| million iirc.
| [deleted]
| zokier wrote:
| > 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 for stuff like web and email. This would open the door
| for people to better offer Mastodon-as-a-service.
| drcongo wrote:
| It really grinds my gears that the publicly funded BBC endlessly
| pushes its viewers to surveillance capitalism to interact in any
| way, creating wealth for two of the worst people on the planet,
| at the viewers' expense.
| JdeBP wrote:
| So this move that _does not_ do this is a good thing, in your
| view?
| drcongo wrote:
| Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear!
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Interesting of course, but also a 6 month trial so whatever that
| means for commitment who knows.
|
| Couple questions:
|
| There's a .bbc TLD? Being used anywhere else? TIL
|
| Who is hosting their instance - is it a third-party or did they
| spin up their own?
| riffic wrote:
| delegated to the root zone in 2015:
|
| https://icannwiki.org/.bbc
| Shrezzing wrote:
| There was a FoI request on the list of .bbc domains last year.
| As of Feb 2022, they ran
|
| alpha.bbc, labs.bbc, nic.bbc, taster.bbc, the.bbc, to.bbc.
| nic.bbc is the only one that resolves, I'd asusme the rest are
| for internal R&D projects and QA links.
|
| https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/820849/response/19688...
| JdeBP wrote:
| Since one of the newly awakened accounts is
| @BBCTaster@Social.BBC, we can be fairly sure what taster.bbc
| is for.
| OJFord wrote:
| Didn't know that either, they should use it for link shortening
| on the ..apex(? Root?) like bbc/deadbeef! Think they currently
| use bbc.news.
|
| I suppose a lot of people (also parsers) wouldn't realise it
| was a URL.
| system16 wrote:
| Nice to see a presence, but half a dozen accounts and not one
| that focuses on major news headlines? Aa it stands the unofficial
| bot that reposts from the Twitter account will still get more
| interaction from me.
| riffic wrote:
| I'd love to see these orgs put AP in their CMS. they could do
| things like @politics@bbc.uk, @sports, @finance,
| @entertainment, @breakingnews, etc, all on their own namespace
| they control.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| They could go even granular if they use their .bbc TLD.
|
| tennis@sports.bbc, italy@foreignaffairs.bbc, you name it.
| They can implement combination feeds by making
| sports@news.bbc boost all the individual categories, so
| people can easily find the specific types of news they're
| interested in.
|
| In the end I think they'll keep down the variety, sticking to
| a Twitter like experience.
| JdeBP wrote:
| This is the first major "name" to have set itself up in the
| FediVerse, after smaller outfits like (for examples) the Texas
| Observer and Bylines have been established there for some time.
| It does indicate which way the wind is now blowing; and they've
| done it the right way with a dedicated site under the BBC's own
| control.
|
| I think that this is going to be a problem in the medium term,
| though, _unless_ actual _people_ at the BBC start getting
| accounts. It will end up as a slightly depressing node full of
| robots, which perception will then have to be overcome.
| input_sh wrote:
| I agree with BBC being the first major _English_ media, but
| German broadcasters have been doing it for a while now:
| https://zdf.social/about and https://ard.social/about
| rinze wrote:
| The Financial Times (well, Alphaville, a kind of blog inside
| the main journal) ran a very short-lived experiment for a few
| months:
| https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788e...
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > This is the first major "name" to have set itself up in the
| FediVerse
|
| In the news space maybe, but the European Union and the Dutch
| government already have their own instances.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Every company/org posting their news using accounts on a
| decentralized interoperable service instance that they self host.
|
| This is the future.
| overnight5349 wrote:
| There's some interesting stuff happening with orgs on mastodon.
| Vice has a bot that posts their articles, but they've done some
| trickery where if you copy the link to a post, you get a link to
| the actual article on their website instead of a link to a
| mastodon post.
|
| It's a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub
| should be used.
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