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The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 1 year ago by jocanib@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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"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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[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago

Why an instance instead of joining an existing one? They can join the effort and do few ones where several publishers can use to create official accounts

[-] tcj@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

Because then someone else would be able to control and censor their content. Really every business should make their own server to ensure that they're the ones fully in control of their content - this is the entire point of federation.

[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago

Good point. You guys are right. It is a good choice

[-] SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Just for records sake, we can see recently with Musk and Twitter and how he manipulated NPR's image by denoting them as "state media".

[-] davetapley@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago

I think the USA's National Weather Service Twitter presence is a good example.

If you look deep enough you'll see caveats like "supplemental service provided by NWS" and "Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information", but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.

That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:

Before last weekend’s storm, the National Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington office sent this tweet saying that because of a new Twitter policy, automated tweets that show advisories, watches, and warnings might not load.

Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly 'social media' style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won't be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.

Finally: if you're reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you'd like a fediverse presence, I did!

[-] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Finally: if you’re reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you’d like a fediverse presence, I did!

Good idea! I just emailed NWS.PA@noaa.gov to ask them not only for a Mastodon instance to replace this stuff, but also for a PeerTube instance to replace https://www.youtube.com/@noaanationalweatherservice .

[-] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the details

[-] neutron@thelemmy.club 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Having their own instance as a public organization adds more legitimacy to their publications. Think of government officials using the organizations domains for email instead of gmail.