The BBC on Mastodon(bbc.co.uk) |
The BBC on Mastodon(bbc.co.uk) |
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I don't think this is the thread best suited for excreting your obvious pent-up anger
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.)
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?
Yes, I would consider basically all of those things to be social media, with the possible exception of wikis and blogs where most people don't go to the blog specifically to comment and read others' comments. They are all media for social interaction.
On the other hand, news websites like bbc.co.uk or company websites like microsoft.com are not, generally speaking, social media.
I realise we can argue forever about the corners of this loose definition I haphazardly threw out. But what is the rationale for distinguishing between Reddit and HN (on the one side) and Twitter and Facebook (on the other)? The root comment of this thread complained about social media being full of marketing, PR, virtue signalling and self-promotion. You can argue that is an unduly harsh assessment, but BBS, IRC, Reddit and HN have all had their fair share of all that stuff.
> why did anyone invent the term "social media" 20 years after it had existed
Because back in the 90s the mainstream media had nothing to say about BBS and IRC so they didn't need a term for it.
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.
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.
If spamming smurf accounts on the reputable instances is hard enough, I guess this isn't an issue.
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.
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.
It's frustrating, but it's also inevitable from such a hostile environment.
It's audio only entertainment. Just.. go with _that_.
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'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.
"Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more fitting.
"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.
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.
It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority
I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web
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.rssThe 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.
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.
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!
https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...
https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york...
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.
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.
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.
Example: https://i.imgur.com/MG1d5kV.jpg
There are about 23,000 fediverse servers online today. The mastodon.social instance is the largest, with about 1/5th of the monthly active users. The other 23,000 servers with the remaining 80% of users won't benefit nearly so much from that hacky feature.
Alas didn't go anywhere. Now nearly 20 years later many companies (amazon, netflix, bbc) still struggle with live streaming at scale
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.
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?
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...
I suppose a lot of people (also parsers) wouldn't realise it was a URL.
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.
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.
In the news space maybe, but the European Union and the Dutch government already have their own instances.
- 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.
This is the future.
1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account
2. Opening up their home instance
3. Going to the terrible search menu
4. Pasting the identifying string of the instance
5. Hoping the search doesn't bug out
6. Clicking follow and hoping the request doesn't bug out and remain in pending for months (yes, this happens)
Instead of the process on 'traditional' social media which is:
1. Click the big shiny button
Why they haven't yet fixed this glaring UX flaw using something like URL protocols is astonishing. I guess this is why technical people shouldn't design products. Nobody cares how it is built if it offers only friction to the end user.
Granted, there are a lot of rough edges around the UX of Mastodon but pasting a url into a form field is at worst mildly annoying.
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.
It's a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub should be used.
Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved back to twitter.
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.
Just implement a smaller Activity Pub server, no need for this Twitter clone stuff
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.
BAHHAHAHAHAHA
Sorry, I forget that some haven't been quite as close to the blast radius of govermental/enterprise IT projects as others to know that "just implement" is a hilarious statement to make.
However much "cleaner/better" a direct integration with the beeb's CMS would be, it is not going to happen on the timescale needed for what is by their own statement, an R&D project.
Spinning up an instance for a few months, is not perfect, it's good enough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon. Are there actually accounts with more than 100K followers? If so who?
EDIT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1cpUKkoT1MUn8_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.
My suspicion is that is how uBlock Origin is able to make the YT ads magically disappear without otherwise blowing up the content stream
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/b15759f5425af9f2f650...
(they did shut down their MP3 streams this year though, which probably did that to some older ones)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100402115118/http://beebotron....
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100408073914/http://beebotron....
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.
"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.
Enabling authorised fetch breaks federation with several other servers and some apps as well. Previously valid post IDs may suddenly become unavailable or break, which some services trying to backfill posts absolutely cannot deal with.
I believe actors are available as barebones actor information not to break federation completely, but I don't believe this type of compatibility is available for individual statuses.
Personally, I don't see why I shouldn't enable the setting on my own servers because the extra control it provides is probably worth it for the few exotic broken servers out there, but it's a gotcha if you expect the protocol to work as described in the spec alone.
I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'll assume it's flawless. The issue is that it doesn't address the broader problem. Like the "official" iPhone app that has a giant, colorful "Join mastodon.social" button above a transparent "Pick another server" option, it serves to push people toward m.s and away from a good federated experience.
The real problem is that the BBC must be in a position whereby, should the government decide to link TV license and BBC access in a hard way, or (god forbid) fully privatise the service, they can flip a switch and make it so. So everything has to be behind a registration wall.
They have been under 13 years of pressure from Tory governments, run by friends of Murdoch, who don't believe in free knowledge and public broadcasting; the BBC had to be seen to go in the general direction of preparing for de-facto privatisation. This is the result.
I think they missed a trick by not getting into the open HDMI dongle market, letting companies like Amazon take the initiative. We now see the result of those non-open platforms (amazon taking 30% of income as a platform provider etc), but with government interference as it is (remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC building an international streaming service back in 2009) I can see why.
A New Labour government run by friends of Murdoch. You can guess the constant there.
It's not about having the necessary version. The feature has to be cookie driven, right? Otherwise, mastodon.social wouldn't be able to remember that an unauthenticated visitor has an account elsewhere. Such a cookie almost certainly won't be available across servers (thanks, ad trackers for ruining it for everyone). That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit.
Think of it this way: suppose a user visits a tiny Mastodon server at social.example.com. They click a user's follow button. How will social.example.com know to redirect the user to the home instance they configured when they visited mastodon.social?
> If I’ve downloaded the Mastodon app without having a server in mind what is the app supposed to do, just list them all?
If someone clicks the "pick another server" option, they're taken to a perfectly serviceable chooser. That should have been the default. It works for all the other apps that don't default to mastodon.social.
It looks like you're correct; I went looking and found that https://universeodon.com had the new feature as well, and I had to type in my home server URL again. I actually thought this was a great solution before I realized you'd have to do it for every server; hopefully they find a better solution for this.
With the feature the way it is today, it makes it a little easier to follow users on mastodon.social, and a little harder to follow users anywhere else. Suppose that hypothetical social.example.com instance has 1 user. If that feature's enabled on the server, anyone wanting to follow that 1 person has to complete that extra step with zero benefit. It's only useful for larger instances, benefitting the few centralized servers without helping the federation as a whole.
You clearly never worked in an ISP.
