Extending our Mastodon social media trial
www.bbc.co.uk
An update reflecting on 6 months of our trial in the federated social media space
  • Felix
    33•3 months ago

    Great to hear hope other news orgs follow suite

    • @Pechente@feddit.deEnglish
      15•3 months ago

      Yeah at this point I’m surprised how news organizations can still be on X. That place is complete bullshit now and I bet the comments on news articles are especially troubling.

      • DessertStorms
        8•3 months ago

        Yeah at this point I’m surprised how news organizations can still be on X

        Why? The people left on there are the ideal target audience for propaganda, plus if it gets them clicks (=money) which is what they’re in the business for, why would they walk away? Expecting ethics in journalism under capitalism is futile (sure, individual ethical journalists exist, but they aren’t the ones we’re talking about nor do they represent the industry).

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    8•3 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    We were aiming to learn about how much work and cost this involved, how many people we’d reach, what levels of engagement we would get and to explore the risks and benefits of the federated model.

    The trial so far has been really effective in helping us learn about how the Fediverse is evolving, what technical support a Mastodon server needs, what the costs are, and how a large media organisation like the BBC can engage with the many different overlapping communities that exist in this rapidly changing space.

    We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse.

    Reassuringly, most of the comments and feedback have been positive, welcoming both our interest and the way we have set things up.We’ve had really encouraging levels of engagement(i.e. replies, re-posts and likes) on Mastodon.

    Because this an experiment and a trial, it’s not always the main priority for all the teams involved, so we may not be able to engage and reply as much as the Mastodon community and culture expect, and we recognise this could be an issue going forward.

    Because of the potential sensitivity around news stories, we need to be particularly careful with our editorial processes and within the scope of this trial we are not in a position to guarantee time and effort from other teams outside of R&D.

    The original article contains 692 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @shinratdr@lemmy.ca
    7•3 months ago

    New Corporate Owned Social Media Network: “ooh cool so many people are using it let’s put all of our critical stuff on there alerts weather warnings and kill our RSS feeds and only interact with customers there”

    New Federated Open Social Media Network: “this is phase 7 of our extremely careful 10 phase plan to possibly repost stuff we put on twitter there if the social media intern remembers”

    Don’t get me wrong I’m glad they’re doing this, but I find it hilarious that everyone trips over themselves launching on Twitter and TikTok without thinking it through at all, and yet for Mastodon it has to be a limited phased trial.