“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in 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, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point.”
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I think this is exactly what I want to see, news orgs (not just “mainstream” news, but let’s say, professional orgs in an industry) hosting their own instances with closed signups for accounts with JUST relevant topics. I tried to find some journalists on journa.host to fill in tech and local news, and while I found the people, it was way too much personal/personality content and not as much news.
Even though I take issue with the BBC, I hope they choose to stay on mastadon in the long term. A large organisation like the BBC on a federated platform is sure to spread word and hopefully convince more people to join the fediverse and see it a a feasible alternative to the current big tech landscape.
This is how twitter and Youtube picked up pace. News organizations stsrted slowly creeping towards it and they have a lot of incentive to do so with how twitter is becoming a cesspool of Nazis and CSAM.
It’s risk mitigation on their part to not have their platform controlled by somebody else, especially someone with an agenda like Elon Musk.
Would like to see them set up a Lemmy instance as well.
And of course, it’s always good to get in these things early, but not too early in case things don’t work out.
It’s interesting that they decided to make their own server and not just join a popular instances like Mastodon Social. I know part of it is then experimenting but if the goal is to just have a presence in the Fediverse, it sounds like a lot of effort for little reason.
Ah yes, more transphobic capitalist corporation on the fedi, surely federating with them will have no repercussion whatsoever /s Fuck them and anyone who federate with this bigots
