Now this is the kind of growth factor the Fediverse needs, not Threads.
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Probably because the need of moderation.
If you host an instance and let people in (even if it’s a limited circle, i.E. your students) you are responsible for moderation. I think that’s something institutions back off currently.
For an mail server that’s much easier.
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Many Universities already have their own dedicated subreddits that are usually moderated by a mix of faculty, staff, and students. I know of at least one sub moderated in part by the chair oftheh math department, who is as funny as they are savage.
An above-average level of shitposting goes on, sure, but it’s also a great venue for the school’s online community to engage across organizational boundaries.
But people can still reply to posts so you’d need moderation still.
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And twitter had moderation when these organizations decided to use it.
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Universities used to have students involved in publishing magazines as journalists, editors etc. This is the evolution. I’m sure a decent sized uni could find or create a student group who can be responsible for moderation under an official administrator.
Then don’t let people post on the server people can repost if they want to comment
Universities have experimented with more private social networks. I remember YikYak back in my uni days. They either don’t have the resource to spin one up or they don’t know about it.
Might not qualify as a social network, but university hosted IRC servers were a thing once.
Because of the network effect and content aggregation. With emails you just want to reach a specific person, with public posts you want to reach as many people as possible. But I also think the whole ownership and control problem of centralized social networks wasn’t as apparent as it is now.
Back in my uni days (1997-01) my uni ran its own Usenet server. Don’t think it carried the alt.binaries, but did have groups specifically for the uni. Sadly only a small handful of people used it.
Same here, and I doubt their IT departments knows deeply about Fediverse. Also some times the department making communication is non technical and not close to IT so people making decisions just choose what they know (Instagram, Twitter, etc). At least that was the case in the University I studied
It’s mostly the latter from what I’ve seen.
At least in my country IT departments have very little wiggle room as organizations have gotten more rigid with increased control from the top echelons. Some universities in my country used to host a lot of cool services for students to use. Nowdays it seems that the legacy stuff is kept online as long as the people maintaining them are around.
I know I’m not the only one who has been saying that this type of move makes perfect sense for governments and news organizations, but I’m going to go ahead and take credit for this.
You’re welcome, guys!
Thanks Garret.
Garret, doing gods work
OH MY GOD GARRET I AM YOUR BIGGEST FAN
Good job getting bbc on mastodon. I searched bbc and ummmm…I guess mastodon just got more spicy.
call us handsfree, safe, and legal
Even Sam and Dave appreciate you, Garret.
All my homies love garret
This makes so much sense.
BBC wouldn’t make their news site under Google Blogger… so why depend on other corporations for your microblogging?
Spin up your own server, have your own verification, then use it on your site and share outs.
I’m a fan of the BBC, they make a lot of terrific programmes and the breadth of the audience their radio stations cater to is pretty phenomenal.
They also have a history of experimenting with technology so it’s not a total surprise they’ve taken this step. Since most people on Mastodon are either sharing British news sources from the BBC or The Guardian anyway it will be interesting to see how they fare…
Yeah me too. I’m Australian, but I really enjoy BBC tv shows, documentaries, and especially podcasts.
Our own ABC was pretty great in the past, but conservative governments have hollowed them out. They do still produce some good reporting and podcasts but they have fallen from their former glory.
Seriously, publicly funded broadcasting, which isn’t beholden to vested interests and advertisers, is an infinitely better model.
Absolutely. And it’s easy to take a lack of adverts for granted when you watch public TV it has to be said.
I may be misremembering but seem to recall them being early to Tw*tter too. Good sign
my guy you don’t have to censor the word twitter
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Well you gotta keep your posts ad friendly, you know?
Aye. Like nerds using M$ for Microsoft.
Apple? More like Crapple, am I right, fellas?
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to be fair, the word Mastodon was being censored on Twitter at one point, but doesn’t mean the other way happens in the Fediverse.
Maybe they were talking about twatter
Are we supposed to call it X now? What a dumb name, in my opinion.
‘The site formerly known as twitter’
The unpleasantly long name just makes it funnier imo
“TSFKAT”.
Fewer letters than “Twitter”, expresses more than “X”.
I have seen worse names (“X Æ A-12”) get more eyeballs.
I liked someone’s suggestion to pronounce it as “ten”
I still call it Twitter and will continue to do so. :)
Does that mean DMX is now running the show over there?
They don’t know who we be
It’s a funny thing people do. Look it up. Some more examples: Brtish, Frace
You accidentally did a markdown there!
That’s why censoring with 🤮 is better:
Br🤮tish, Fr🤮nchbrish
Musk himself is censoring Twitter
I literally saw it everywhere on Mastodon, like, I honestly never saw anyone say it directly, just “birdsite” or a censored version. So I adapted to be polite. And sometimes forget which form of fediverse I’m posting on.
It’s spelled twatter
It would be funny to censor X just with a single *
Cool.
Very!
This could set a precedent!
This is already the case in the Netherlands and Germany, actually! They each have a mastodon instance
And the EU commission or something
It’s an instance with all the EU governmental bodies. It’s social.network.europa.eu
…and already blocked by at least one instance, mastodon.art.
While I don’t think it’s necessarily sufficient to justify defederating their whole instance, it’s worth noting that the reason they gave is definitely accurate. The BBC is incredibly transphobic. Here’s a Wikipedia article about one of their worst, most prominent instances. It’s no more so than is pretty standard in Britain these days, sadly, but that’s not a good bar to measure yourself against.
There was a big campaign of utilising the BBC’s complaints process to complain about the many flaws in that article. Here’s a YouTube video by one person involved in that campaign. That’s part 1 of 4 as the different stages of the process played out. The TL;DW is that the BBC ended up ignoring the complaints and ended up picking up on small flaws in the way the complaint was phrased (or just making up flaws where they didn’t really exist) to use as an excuse to “respond” saying there was no problem with their journalistic standards.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/b4buJMMiwcg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Obviously I would not want to defend that article. But it is worth pointing out that the BBC lets all sorts publish. So it’s not that the institution is necessarily transphobic, it’s just that individual who wrote the article is.
So it’s not that the institution is necessarily transphobic, it’s just that individual who wrote the article is.
This would be a reasonable response, were it not for the way that they repeatedly defended the article and did some crazy mental gymnastics to avoid responding to the critiques levied at it. Because the people responding to complaints going through the formal complaints process have to be ones who truly represent what the BBC as an institution is about. If they don’t, what’s the point of that process existing?
When I see this shit I lose all hope in the Fediverse’s success
I think it’s just the one server run by a mentalcase tbh. Not the first time I’ve seen them mentioned. The other thing was them freaking out because of GIMP.
The art software GIMP? What happened?
Probably the word “gimp” and not understanding that since it’s all in capital letter that means it’s an abbreviation, and that abbreviation is "GNU image manipulation program. "
This is so dumb. Jesus.
Wait I’m out of the loop. When was BBC transphobic?
EDIT: Is this it? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/"We're_being_pressured_into_sex_by_some_trans_women"
We really need a way to block entire instances at the user level.
Why am I not surprised lol
This is the way.
…to make the fediverse useless, yes
This could really get the ball rolling
I think this may be the year if the Linux desktop as well
Lmao , as far as the joke is concerned , I think linux desktop is as good as it is !!
The Dutch Government also launched an instance not that long ago. It’s a pity it took so long, but Musk’s antics are finally forcing people to move.
German Public broadcast also has its own instance, as does the government.
Also the EU: social.network.europa.eu
At least X allows free speech.
At least X allows free speech.
Nope.
Fair enough. I feel like I disagree with you based on what I’ve seen, but us disagreeing is free speech.
Totally agree, even if I disagree with your opinion it’s fine 🤝
Good job there isn’t a story just today about twitter using threats of legal action to harass researchers for their free speech eh?
The anti hate group research? 🤣
Right on. 😄
Edit to add. I think it swings both ways. I’ve seen the Beeb and ‘X’ curtail speech. It would be hilarious if the BBC got cancelled for being transphobic.
This is great! The Dutch government made their own official instance (social.overheid.nl) too!
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@BBCRadio4@social.bbc has also popped up today. Seems like the least “experimental” of them so far (in name at least).
Seems like if the “experiment” goes well this account will just be ready to roll.
Radio 4 is the most serious channel they do as well. Mostly news and politics, with documentaries and a small amount of comedy.
I ignore all the politics from the BBC, though general news and entertainment, documentaries are all broadly fine. But they’re *politically *compromised by state-funding and imo are blatantly corrupt.
Technically the BBC are not “state-funded” but funded by UK viewers paying for a voluntary licence to watch.
I would certainly agree though that the UK government’s influence in appointing staff in the upper echelons of the organisation (and also general government interference in its day to day running) leaves it open to criticism.
They don’t treat it like a voluntary license, they constantly harass people that don’t pay. Assuming you’re always guilty if you don’t have one.
Yeah definitely. I remember the fake “Detector Vans” designed to frighten people but I suspect going forward with more and more younger people only using Netflix/Amazon Prime etc their attitude will have to change.
They tell you to notify them if you don’t need a license, but it changes fuck all, you still get letters every couple of months that get increasingly more threatening. It’s so dumb.
Not sure why you felt the need to piggy back your general critique of BBC journalistic independence on my post. Feels like a major swerve in topic.
I was explaining to those that may not know BBC Radio 4 what kind of channel it is and how it might be a good sign of them taking Mastodon seriously. I wasn’t suggesting people listen to it.
Because your comment was related to what I had to say, and I also agreed with you. I did see a comment that echoed my criticism of the BBC lower down, but I hadn’t seen it before I posted my comment.
It’s a smart thing for news sources and ngos to do - run an instance and use it to issue posts and provide a platform for journalists. Twitter and other platforms can still receive posts but the “source of truth” is the Mastodon server
Didn’t know they have their own TLD
I can imagine all the domain names that people would come up with if .bbc TLD was public lol
Heresmy.bbc
That is fucking awesome.
I love the BBC, I hate seeing what it’s been forced to turn into by threats from a succession of Conservative governments. I still pay my TV license despite pirating all my TV and movie content for years.
I’m glad there’s nuance to the discussion, I was worried by the 95+% glazing going on.
How can one add social.bbc to my Lemmy subscribed list?
Lemmy doesn’t do microblogging.
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How do you do that? I’ve tried and couldn’t get it to work.
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And this is why I use Kbin.
You cannot follow the entire instance as such, rather the individual accounts on the instance - such as @BBCRD, @BBC_News_Labs, @Connected_Studio etc.
Kbin users can subscribe to whatever content is shared from social.bbc on federated instances by subscribing to /d/social.bbc, but I’m not sure how much sense that makes. :)
Edit: In Lemmy you’d find the users by entering for example /u/BBCRD@social.bbc, but as @roguetrick pointed out Lemmy is not really made for microblogging.
Unsure if you can follow entire instances but you can definitely follow users from that instance such as https://kbin.social/u/@BBCRD@social.bbc
No expert, but I have a Mastodon account + app and a Lemmy account + app.
