The BBC on Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

The BBC on Mastodon

bbc.co.uk

442 points_han174 comments

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 There is no way I am using multiple proprietary podcast apps so I end up listening to topical comedy a month out of date...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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think it's that.

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.

The BBC has a history of fighting that -- when ITV Digital collapsed, the BBC was quickly out of the gates to get DTT decoders with no CAM modules as the norm.

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.

> remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC

A New Labour government run by friends of Murdoch. You can guess the constant there.

They really jumped the shark when they made you have to sign in to the BBC News app. I uninstalled it and just decided to use my browser, and guess what, I now read the BBC less, so well done. But then I know I'm not the typical person on the street, so unfortunately this probably did yield a lot of new sign ups, under duress

“Inevitable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this comment

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

They could do that by entering the 21st century and having an IP-locked subscription system.

Because every house has a single, unchangeable IP...?

You clearly never worked in an ISP.

I definitely did not work at an ISP. But what I said doesn't require a static IP per house. Just GeoIP so non-UK residents are treated differently (unless they VPN).

The target is not to determine whether the client is in the UK, but whether the client is a specific license-payer or at a specific address. GeoIP doesn't help to get either of those datapoints.

How does that get them subscription estimates?

Then they can make sure people in the UK have a subscription account.

Enforced by a proprietary app?

Yes, called iPlayer[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_iPlayer

Or Sounds which is basically the audio version of iplayer

No; inevitable is a claim, not a support.

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.

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.

French public broadcasters are ad-supported, they don't have to separate local and overseas websites/apps/revenue logic. I've seen another comment about the BBC having ads for other BBC content; I already get ads in my Radio France podcasts (just the one before the proper content), and they're dynamic, so they surely change them depending on where you listening to maximize revenue. Probably the same type of dynamic advertising I get when listening to US podcasts with inverted French-speaking ads.

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

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_.

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'

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.

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)

The main appliances (Google, Amazon) already go through a pre-installed BBC app to serve their content.

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://beebotron....

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100408073914/http://beebotron....

[2] http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm surprised they even have those feeds at all. I presumed their days were numbered when Sounds came out. It's not just them, a lot of podcasts seem to really not want you to use their plain old RSS feed, instead hiding it behind collapsable segments and similar. I guess they get more metrics (and maybe money) if you use Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever. Then of course there are the ones with outright exclusivity deals

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

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

Technically it only supports http in spec https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29985571/w3c-validator-s...

TIL. In experiments I have run, most feeds use https.

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.

There are multiple BBCs; the commercial arm ruins everything.

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.

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!

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...

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...

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.

Presumably the end goal would be to have BBC personalities with accounts on the BBC server, so at that point the Mastodon microblogging will make sense. This seems like a bit of a trial balloon that will hopefully lead to more.

So the only way to see the posts and interactions on the web would be via other instances?

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.

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

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.

"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.

Authorized fetch is just one lever to pull in the massive moderation machine that Mastodon offers. On its own it's not very useful, but together with decent configuration it can help against scammers impersonating accounts on your server from a similar domain. Twitter is full of people who replicate other accounts and add random racist shit for some obscure reason (a deep grudge? Mental illness?) and without authorized fetch you'll have no way to effectively block such scrapers.

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.

If you want an off-the-shelf ActivityPub thing, a Mastodon instance is arguably one of the paths of less resistance.

> Just implement a smaller Activity Pub server, no need for this Twitter clone stuff

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

I fully agree with you, although this is still step in the right direction compared to them sticking to Twitter/FB/etc.

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.

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.

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.

Honest question about Elk (and I guess all other web clients): How do people use it when it doesn't remember your timeline position? When I open my Mastodon client, I want it to be where I left it, not at the top of the timeline. Maybe it's becoming unusual to be a timeline completionist, but I can only use clients that reliably remember my timeline position.

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.

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

That seems typical of the mastodon.social instance: roll out something that works for them, then likely call it a day and mark it solved.

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.

mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?

Mainly that it only benefits giant instances. That's a convenient feature for people on a tiny instance following users on mastodon.social, but adds friction for users on mastodon.social who want to follow users on a tiny instance.

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.

I’m not sure I grasp the argument here. No feature should be switched on until all 23,000 servers have updated to the necessary version?

> I’m not sure I grasp the argument here. No feature should be switched on until all 23,000 servers have updated to the necessary version?

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.

> That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit

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.

If it worked that way, I'd support it completely! I think the idea is great. I just don't think it can be implemented in a cross-instance way, short of having some sort of central server.

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.

really this should be implemented as a browser extension...

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.

That's just on the web interface -- all the apps make it much easier.

Hopefully we'll see browser integration eventually

Federations are the worst way to implement decentralization. All because people are afraid of blockchains.

Right, it's only because of fear that blockchains aren't used for this use case, there are no other differences whatsoever.

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.

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

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.

Product owners eventually do this to every tech platform to justify their existence

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

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

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/b15759f5425af9f2f650...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

Since one of the newly awakened accounts is @BBCTaster@Social.BBC, we can be fairly sure what taster.bbc is for.

delegated to the root zone in 2015:

https://icannwiki.org/.bbc

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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/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.

Mastodon has more than 10 million... but a lot of these are probably duplicated, bots, etc. Active users are about 1.7 million iirc.

Every company/org posting their news using accounts on a decentralized interoperable service instance that they self host.

This is the future.

Seeing this some non technical people will try out this Mastodon thing. If they can get past the initial hassle of choosing an instance to sign on they will try to 'Follow' the BBC account on the social.bbc instance, only to be greeted by this user friendly process:

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.

Plenty of non-technical people have already succeeded at trying Mastodon out, and the process for following people outside of your instance, while awkward, doesn't seem to be the impossible hassle some make it out to be.

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.

My point is: if Mastodon can't get something as basic as an interaction with posts frictionless, I am skeptical that it can solve the more complicated problems, like profile migrations, discoverability, data retention etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder how CNN will respond to this, I usually think there's some sort of competition between these two news outlets.

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.

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.

So this move that does not do this is a good thing, in your view?

Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear!

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.

mastodon is the new mirc or kleenex

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.

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.

But won't replies from other servers show up on the BBC's page if they post something?

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-...

> 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.

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.

Hm. Interesting, thanks for elaborating.

If spamming smurf accounts on the reputable instances is hard enough, I guess this isn't an issue.

I clicked on their federated timeline and the first thing I saw was a post from someone named "horsefucker thicc".

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

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.

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.

Not really, HN is a forum.

Do you realize that a forum is social media?

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.

"That's a cat." "No it's not, those were around long before the word 'cat' existed".

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.

see comment below. you are wrong no matter how nerdy your logic.

I'm just here for the spectacle of someone using the "you are nerdy, therefore wrong" argument on hacker news, of all places.

you're here for the upvotes and validation that your comment was witty

Ah, "everyone knows." The only argument that can't possibly work against anyone.

I could replace "everyone knows" with "it's common sense"

The term "social media" was coined in 1997 in reference to AOL chatrooms. It can totally apply to web forums as well.

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

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?

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.)

> 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?

> 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"

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 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.

Not really. HN is a forum.

Curious, what are your criteria for distinction?

common sense

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".

agree about the narcissism but for a news org, this is their RSS.

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.

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.

That used to be what I used social media for, but Twitter lost its utility for that sometime in the early 2010s.

Yeah pretty much. It turned into an Outrage Machine, because that makes more money. I started running a Mastodon for myself and some friends in the mid-2010s and it's been really nice.

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.

Great to see the world's premier peddlers of NATO-cheerleading and sinophobia now on an open protocol.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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...

You clearly have your own pre-existing gripes with the BBC, which have very little to do with this story.

I guess the difference is "old media" is held more accountable than "new media" when they lie.

> 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.

> 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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com