The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in 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, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."
Relying on a third party for your social media presence is a bad idea. Imagine if Elon got a bug up his ass and banned all BBC accounts; they’d be left in a lurch. Or if, as we saw, someone else got a blue checkmark and pretended to be the BBC.
But by running their own site they have control over who posts what, while still able to interact with users on other instances.
I think governmental organizations should do the same. It's absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon's goodwill.
The Dutch government already made an official mastodon instance: social.overheid.nl
The Netherlands just can't stop being based
With Mastodon being a German non-profit company, it's natural that Germany is also well-represented with a federal instance social.bund.de, instance for the state of Baden-Württemberg bawü.social (both since 2020), world's largest public broadcasters ARD ard.social and ZDF zdf.social, and AFAIK the first news publisher to officially launch its own instance, Heise social.heise.de. There are probably loads of other instances and accounts I'm missing.
PS: The production company behind ZDF Magazin Royale (late night comedy and investigative journalism show, think Last Week Tonight ) is also running a private instance edi.social and a public instance det.social, named after the Mainzelmännchen.