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.
This is very intriguing… I actually work in CBC (nowhere near content or with the social media people who’d make these kinds of decisions), but as a developer I get 20% time to dabble with anything I think might be useful. I haven’t used it in a while, but a CBC ActivityPub instance may be just the right project, especially if it can auto-publish our content from the same feeds that power our site.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca) , one of the co-authors of ActivityPub is super interest in getting Canadian news organisations on board the fediverse. He gave a talk about that last night actually: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/110809723914430376
If you’re serious about this, you could totally reach out to him, I’m sure he would love to hear from people in CBC
@wisdomchicken @Hazzard absolutely! Hazzard, I’d love to discuss!
gods tagging someone’s masto directly from lemmy, and them being able to directly respond via masto is just so fucking nice
This has just opened my eyes. I get it now.
This whole thing makes sense.
Thank you.
Welcome to the club! I did an audible ‘oooooh’ the first time ActivityPub really clicked with me lol.
@wisdomchicken it’s funny that it seems like magic, since we’re all on the same Internet. We’ve been conditioned to have such low expectations!
News publishers like BBC and CBC could also repurpose their RSS feeds, by creating individual accounts on their own Mastodon for each of the topics and make the same rss content available through there. This would make it easy for users to sub to news they are interested in: https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
Yes, this can actually be done. There’s a tool called #MastoFeed that allows you to post RSS content to the fediverse. Some publications like #DarkReading are exploring using MastoFeed to publish their articles.
Their account can be found here: https://infosec.town/@darkreading
That being said, not sure if a bot account is what people are hoping for if #CBC decides to join the fediverse…
Also, you might want to take a look at https://zdf.social/@ZDF and https://ard.social/
ZDF and ARD are the two biggest broadcasters in Germany, and they both have their own ActivityPub (Mastodon) server.
In case you needed some extra convincing that other large mainstream news organisations also have realised that this is actually a good idea that makes sense ;)
A big news org from France is also on Mastodon with like 50k followers, but I cannot remember the name right now
The actual Dutch government now also run their own instance.
Hope you’re able to get it in front of the right eyes! Running an instance that is verifiably yours is basically the blue check mark of the fediverse (for something like a news org, at least)
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.
Honestly with this model of social networking now past its infancy and the most painful growing pains (I think), every entity of any meaningful size should be creating their own Mastodon (and Lemmy) instance. Governments, corporations, non profits, etc.
Validation, message control, etc are crucial to success, and leaving that in the hands of some for profit entity that doesn’t have your interests at heart is a recipe for disaster. So many companies had to decide if they wanted to keep their access to customers on the Bird Site while dealing with people saying the N word and cheering literal Nazis. That wouldn’t be a problem in federated space: just defederate.
I don’t think we’re gonna see anything worse than the first month where vlemmy and fmhy got nuked. I think big instances that exist now are gonna stick around for a while.
Honestly with this model of social networking now past its infancy and the most painful growing pains (I think)
The most painful growing pains for any social networking service is their Eternal September moment.
I am not so sure we’re past that as we keep seeing over, and over, and over again.
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.
Plus, free RSS!
(For the five of us that still care about that, anyway.)
RSS forever!
There are dozens of us!
Dozens!
Almost 50!
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.
@SlikPikker Would using an RSS reader help with navigation? Allows you to follow CBC News without having to dig through their website.
You can find the RSS list here: https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
Thanks, I’ll check it out. It might help yeah.
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.
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.
100% agree. Now they are free of catering to a billionaire’s gamed anti-democratic algorithms. There’s an opportunity to get back to REAL news reporting again.
When the CBC was label as propaganda on the platform formerly know as Twitter, didn’t the CBC say they were going to be involved in decentralized social media?
idk if I want an entire instance made up of CBC commenters.
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).
Maybe most of them won’t figure out how to login here. Especially if they force 2fa.
The difference here being that a CBC instance wouldn’t have to follow dumb rules … they’d make up their own so the racists, multi-phobics, etc wouldn’t have much of a platform.
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?
On a cost level, yes it would make sense to leverage mstdn.ca but issue is that CBC wouldn’t have the complete control & the instant brand recognition via hosting their own instance on their domain name.
It’s also much better for the brand to have an account on social.cbc.ca. Something like cbcnews@social.cbc.ca looks better on a branding perspective than cbcnews@mstdn.ca. It’s no different than how organizations use their own domain for emails.
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.
The possessive pronoun is “its”. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”.
Thank you for the correction.
i-verseThis 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.
Yeah, this is such a great thing. Really hope CBC takes note and follows.
Also, hope this is a success.
I don’t know. We already have mstdn.ca and it is free (as in speech) and supported by CIRA.
They would be fulfilling different roles. The social.bbc site isn’t going to be open to the public but rather specific to BBC content and journalists.
Plus an account in a potential social.cbc.ca domain has the advantage that you know automatically that it’s a legit CBC account.
Ah true! I didn’t think of it that way. I kind of forgot how the whole federation thing worked for a second there lol.
