As it says in the title, the BBC is starting its own Mastodon instance. I think the CBC (and other news networks) should do similar. Particularly with the recent passing of Bill C-18 it seems like a world where the links we share are crossposts to news organization’s own content is the perfect resolution to that whole issue.
I think that this is an important part of the future of the fediverse. News sites and the like have shitty poorly moderated comment sections that serve almost no purpose. They have the resources to sustain a large instance and like you said it lets them more easily monetize their work. It seems like wins all around if enough news outlets adopt it.
I think it would be pretty cool if I could subscribe to different CBC sections, and have it show up in my normal feeds, I think this would mitigate the biases that relying on news going viral creates without having to go to the cbc itself and scrape through it myself.
This is so much better than relying on tweeter assuming it can be medium for some sort of commons!
For sure. Reading through the entire cbc.ca site feels so unfeasible and exhausting. Having it actually categorized and browsable without all the attention-grabbing mega headlines would make it much more readable.
Don’t click on a CBC app video link either, you will have to watch 30 seconds of ads before the article…EVERY TIME.
Do you not have uBlock Origin?
Does not work on the app. I use it otherwise.
Yes, I think this is really the future. I remember there was a country that was also planning to make their own instance in the fediverse as well.
This is the start of the use cases I wanted to see take off with Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. Much like the previous era of distributed content with user-hosted voice servers and forums, having larger communities/organizations run their own instances and avoid trying to treat the space as one big pool of content is the real use case here. The fact that you can cross-instance subscribe and post makes it viable long-term.
It also gives “free” verification of information’s sources based on the domain, the same way that (modern) email gives you an extra layer of confidence when you see a verified domain. I would love the see the Government of Canada, CBC, Universities, all starting their own instances and utilizing them in unique and interesting ways. With enough adoption, official provincial/municipality instances could pop up to make organized communities easier.
It feels to me like a starting move away from the autocracy that the platform economy has created. It’s not universal, but I absolutely push back against too many instances trying to be “general purpose Reddit replacements” because that seems like a fleeting use case for what it can eventually become, and it just confuses the whole abstraction of what these decentralized socials afford.
I love the idea of verified domains, that is such a great concept! One of the really worrisome things with the insanity in social media is where can people get valid emergency information.
The involvement of the BBC encouraged me to finally figure it out. And now I REALLY want a CBC one. They could have a feed per show, all hosted internally. It’s a no-brainer.
I’d get back to listening “The Secret Life of Canada” podcast if there was an active lemmy community for it :-P
idk if I want an entire instance made up of CBC commenters.
Maybe most of them won’t figure out how to login here. Especially if they force 2fa.
There always seem to be 2. The real answer is in the comments (Reddit/Lemmy), and the comments are worth ignoring (Cbc/CTV/Facebook)
Yeah, tell me about it. The dumbest thing the CBC ever did was open up to comments.
Seriously, who are these people commenting on CBC articles? I don’t usually even look at the comments anymore, simply because any time I did, they were full of the shittiest, dumbest assholes I’ve ever seen. I’m embarrassed to even share a country with people who comment on CBC articles.
By comparison, comments on Reddit and Lemmy are usually okay. Not good by any means (especially in the right leaning mess that was r/Canada), but miles better than CBC’s comments (which I can only assume are completely unmoderated).
Yeah, this is such a great thing. Really hope CBC takes note and follows.
Also, hope this is a success.
It’s kind of ironic, because a massive reason for the enshittification of Twitter is Musk’s rampant transphobia, and the BBC is famous among the trans community for platforming transphobes. I’d have thought they’d be perfectly happy to stay on Twitter.
I mean, there’s a lot more wrong with Twitter than just transphobia, but you can trace it back there. It was a big part of the “free speech” argument that transphobes were getting silenced, which is what drove Musk to want to own the site, and also drove him down the right-wing-identity-politics rabbit hole that turned him into the wingnut he is today. That and anti-COVID measures hurting his bottom line.
Musk was not “turned into” a wingnut. He “always was” a wingnut. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find him being a contentious, antisocial prick from his youth onward. It’s just that the richer he got the more people looked.
Also being openly asshole was not a proven model pre-Trump so most assholes showed some restraint in public
The possessive pronoun is “its”. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”.
Thank you for the correction.
This is good in some ways and I welcome the BBC to the fediverse as an important step to universal acceptance. It’s far better than using flaky bridges from other social networks.
What is disappointing is the very small range of content provided so far, Radio 4 & 5 plus some curiosities. I’d hoped for the excellent 6 Music channel. Let’s see if they keep up with the sports in particular on 5. I’m glad that it’s divided by station / topic so I can follow only what interests me.
I too would like more national broadcasters to get onboard. CBC I’m sure have some interesting content to share with the world, as do ABC, RTE, NZBC, others? I’d love to have culture from across the globe, which is the real value for Mastodon for me rather than as a news feed.
Great move on the part of the BBC. Given all the issues on Twitter, hopefully the CBC will also make a move to Mastodon. I recall when Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, closed comments on Twitter due to abusive garbage, that I wrote her office and suggested Mastodon. Alas, they did not follow through. But hopefully this move from the BBC will inspire some of our Canadian institutions (particularly the CBC) to reconsider and to make the move to the fediverse.
That article states she closed down **all **social media comments. This would include Facebook, etc. as well. I feel they see Mastodon as no different than other social media sites.
Some instances (at least mastodon.art) are already blocking them.
What’s the reason to block them? Doesn’t it genuinely expand the fediverse?
IIUC it’s because the BBC has had some dabbling with transphobia. A few admins are inferring that their Mastodon moderation policies will be similar to their editorial practices so it’s just a matter of blocking yet another instance that has a mismatch in moderation policy.
Business as usual on Mastodon, that’s why it’s decentralized in the first place.
mastodon.artusers who want to participate on thesocial.bbcinstance can just go do so using another instance.
I agree. Hosting a “Twitter” alternative yourself that you can control. And bringing news to people on other platforms. You need big players on the alternative platforms to make them viable for more people.
This seems very awesome! I’d love to see them go as far as having their own Lemmy instance too!
I feel this move helps legitimize Mastodon in a way that other companies follow suit to get away from the mess that twitter is now.
I didn’t know about the BBC thing, that’s a pretty big deal for the fediverse. A question though, in the linked BBC article, it seems like they’re heavily relying on moderation to come from the home instance of anyone who posts a reply to a BBC post. If a self hosted troll server decides to start aggressively spamming these media accounts, or posts illegal material as replies to their posts, what could a media organization do to stop it? Is there any protection against say a wide network of troll servers working together?
Traditional social media at least theoretically has a better ability to shut this sort of activity down because they can see the whole picture of user activity and use algorithms to discover and ban bots. I worry that decentralization itself will become an attack vector for malicious activity.
Isn’t this what defederation is for? If it became enough of an issue media companies could even work together to maintain a shared blacklist to reduce the individual burden.
Good point & thanks for the post.
Won’t different media companies have different red lines for what gets blacklisted and what doesn’t, and wouldn’t that be at best confusing, and worse, a political quagmire? Let’s say (after the fediverse gains some momentum) an influential politician uses a self hosted instance to exclusively communicate their policies, and as a home for their political base, but leaves the server moderated well below an acceptable level on purpose. Are media companies obligated to defederate it? Will they? Seems like there is a whole new world of trade-offs and grey areas here.
Even if we assume troll instances are easily and effectively defederated and can’t be spun up faster than they can be collectively blocked. Other than volunteer moderation, what stops an ocean of trolls from flooding better-known, federated instances?
Just want to make clear - I’m 100% an advocate for the fediverse, I’m here because I think it’s awesome right now. I just worry about the chances for it to get drowned in troll/malicious/corporate material as it grows in popularity, and I’m trying to think if there are any ways to stem that tide. Seems reasonable to expect that it will start coming.
In your example, people who have the “bad instances” blocked won’t see the replies under the posts in question, as the instance will not fetch replies from said source.
With how Mastodon works as well, it won’t fetch replies from instances until they’re known either, so brand new instances aren’t going to flood popular comment sections - this is a bit of a con though in a way, as it degrades the user experience when trying to read threads and causes people to constantly post the same stuff as they can’t see all the replies.
At some point, a lot of server will start to be defederated and some big player will start to be more trust-worthy. Just like email servers.
One cannot start sending email with their own server without proving it’s reliable first.
I hope that we, as a society (the gov), make a process on how to become a trusted server instead of relying on the free market for this because right now, it’s very hard to send emails without being blacklisted by every major email provider.
This is great to see. They cite moderation as a concern. Turning off replies to all posts could help reduce that burden.
Would doing this be redundant to https://mstdn.ca who has a tie-in with the CIRA?
Or maybe CBC and mstdn.ca could work together?
The BBC instance is trying to fulfill a different role than mstdn.ca fulfills. The social.bbc site (and presumably a similar CBC effort also) is not open to general membership, strictly BBC employees and content. So conceivably a CBC journalist could have a social.cbc.ca account for their work and a mstdn.ca account for their personal life.
