BBC Launches A Mastodon Instance

realcaseyrollins@kbin.projectsegfau.lt to Fediverse@kbin.social – 2 points –
social.bbc

Hi! 👋 Here's our #introduction. We're BBC Research & Development; we explore and test new technology to discover how the BBC can best make use of it in the future. For 100 years our engineers have been at the forefront of developments in broadcasting. We're now researching how everyone could get TV & radio via the internet – along with all the flexibility and creativity that brings. 5G, AI, next-gen audio, UHD, personal data… we are investigating all these – and more! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzztGFXYR1Y

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Honestly, this is really good to hear! More mainstream accounts will definitely get the fediverse a bit more credibility.

And here's a bit more from BBC:

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 Fediverse.

This is an experiment - we will run it for 6 months, and then look at how much value it has provided, how much work it requires to maintain and then decide whether and how to continue. We're learning as we go, and we'll write about what we discover in the hope that it might be useful for others. The BBC will continue its normal social media activity in the usual places.

We're starting off small with just a handful of accounts from R&D and our colleagues at BBC Radio, but we hope to be adding more accounts from other areas of the BBC soon:

  • @BBCRD@social.bbc


  • @BBC5Live@social.bbc


  • @BBCRadio4@social.bbc


  • @BBC_News_Labs@social.bbc


  • @BBCTaster@social.bbc


  • @Connected_Studio@social.bbc

-https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2023-07-mastodon-distributed-decentralised-fediverse-activitypub

And believe it or not, there are now people rallying for the BBC to be defederated. Sure I understand that the current British government is pushing some of their newscasters into less than reputable positions, but to ban the entire domain preemptively?

I supported a pre-emptive Threads defederation, because I expect them to Embrace-Extend-Extinguish the fediverse for the sake of profit.

For the BBC, I don't feel as overtly opposed. They don't really have the user base to overextend us with, even if they tried to get their audience on mastodon lol. They haven't seemed blatantly profit driven in the past. And they're starting their own instance, using fediverse tech.

Does anyone think this is the BBC's Embrace step? It's not sparking any alarm bells for me, but can I get a sanity check?