Their obsession with trying to get me to use it instead of normal RSS feeds or third party radio services like TuneIn is incredibly frustrating. They have intentionally broken the experience for smart speaker users and podcast listeners because they are incapable of enticing them over with a better experience. The obsession with control has soured my feelings towards BBC radio.
BBC Sounds feels like it's part of that efforts, but I'd be interested to know more given how much family members complain about the costs of licencing and services relative to the quality.
It's frustrating, but it's also inevitable from such a hostile environment.
It's audio only entertainment. Just.. go with _that_.
I also use that method to listen to live radio:
alias bbc1='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_one.m3u8'
alias bbc1x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_1xtra.m3u8'
alias bbc2='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_two.m3u8'
alias bbc3='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_three.m3u8'
alias bbc4='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_fourfm.m3u8'
alias bbc5='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live.m3u8'
alias bbc5x='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_radio_five_live_sports_extra.m3u8'
alias bbc6='mpv http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/hls/uk/sbr_high/ak/bbc_6music.m3u8'I would use Sounds, but the UI is actually really fiddly to get to where I need to go, you can "subscribe" but you can't have playlists or queues. It's just a bit rubbish all round.
"Music, radio, and for some reason podcasts" is much more fitting.
"How can they do that, the show is an uninterrupted 45 minutes of talking" you might ask. Well, they just insert it at a random point somewhere, possibly halfway through a sentence. It's both very annoying and amateurish.
It's a shame because they were so forward looking in the digital and streaming game and this feels so regressive. Beeb aren't going to get more license fee out of me because I use their feckin' app. As you say, it's not killer so why would they even bother with the pettiness? Just makes me sad really.
It's a shame because RSS podcasts are naturally distributed (probably because they date from back when that was the default mode of the web). No need to bow down to someone else's content rules - if you have a domain and the ability to host some fairly small files, you can have a podcast which can be loaded into thousands of apps across all platforms with no central authority
I'd also take that as a lesson to some younger people getting into decentralization afresh and thinking it requires heavyweight federation. You don't necessarily need a complicated protocol and your servers talking to each other. Just standard client interfaces and then the client can do the aggregation with distribution as a natural property, like the web
Why does BBC do this. Or maybe it's the podcast apps that do it. Weird.
"In Our Time" is one example.
printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
|nc -vvn 125.252.212.113 80 > 1.rss
printf 'GET /b006qykl.rss HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' \
|openssl s_client -connect 125.252.212.113:443 -ign_eof > 1.rssThe killing off of "Mock the Week" around the same time that free BBC radio comedy was forcibly dissociated from the news cycle just seems suspicious. And we know that BBC management has been loaded with Tory faithful, it stinks.
In Our Time is an absolute tour de force. Bragg just brings such an enlightened academic curiosity to so varied a corpus of subjects. It's a delight to follow along in the wake of him and his guests.
From Brexit to ruining IoT was when I decided I would no longer consider myself British. My citizenship is just be a piece of trivia now.
Secondly, for being NOT an OG org. on the fediverse, i have to say that the BBC folks here really nailed the definiton of the Fediverse: "...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..." I acknowledge that some newbies might not care so much about naunce and correctness of some topics, but i believe it matters...and i am impressed that BBC did such a great job here. Cheers and good luck to BBC folks running this!
https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccij...
https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2l...
https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york...
Mastodon is great but you don't need to use it to participate in the federated ecosystem
edit: it's also news to me that the BBC has their own TLD. This opens up a lot of potential that others don't have the privilege of.
Just implement a smaller Activity Pub server, no need for this Twitter clone stuff
For example, Mastodon has some artifical requirements that add signature requirements to public APIs to reduce bot and spam load. This isn't in the spec as a mandatory requirement, but if you don't do it then parts of the Fediverse won't be able to follow you. There are also expectations attached to certain activities that aren't in the spec but will confuse people on most other servers.
The easiest solution I came up with was to run a server that already does all of the hard work (gotosocial, Mastodon, etc) and call its API to add new posts.
BAHHAHAHAHAHA
Sorry, I forget that some haven't been quite as close to the blast radius of govermental/enterprise IT projects as others to know that "just implement" is a hilarious statement to make.
However much "cleaner/better" a direct integration with the beeb's CMS would be, it is not going to happen on the timescale needed for what is by their own statement, an R&D project.
Spinning up an instance for a few months, is not perfect, it's good enough.
ActivityPub and Mastodon are both fucking awesome, and I'm confident the Fediverse can support a social media tool painless enough for grandpa to confidently migrate his fly-fishing discussion group to from his Facebook group. I'm also sure all of the good work folks are doing on the existing tool set will still be valuable in that world; but it's probably not going to be the thing that makes decentralized social media the standard rather than a distant fringe alternative to most non-technical folks. I've got my eye on Bluesky but I'd really love to see someone figure out a way to tighten things up non-commercially. I've tried digging into the problem a few times, but the conceptual simplicity of centralized social media is a huge selling point for regular folks.
A browser plugin like https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/mastodon-simplif... to follow, favorite, etc. directly on any server has also improved my experience a lot.
However, the disconnect between non-technical users and what Mastodon offers is far deeper than the timeline layout and interactions. If users must practically understand how to negotiate federation to satisfy their most basic requirement-- nearly effortlessly finding and interacting with their friends, family and other sources within the interface-- then it's a non-starter for that crowd.
Most developers seem not to realize a) how much more resistance dealing with the practical complexity of federation adds for non-technical users trying to do what they want to do, and b) how little resistance those users will tolerate to achieve their goals when they have free options. As it stands, the cost/benefit ratio to switching to Mastodon is not even in the ballpark of what it needs to be for nearly any social media user. Mastodon's huge active user base fluctuation 5-10 mos ago comprises about half a percent of Twitter's active monthly user base, which entirely leaves out Facebook, Instagram, Etc... and most of Mastodon's new ex-twitter users left.
Click follow -> dialog full of text, which gives the most common instructions (to copy and paste into the search field on your server) in smaller text at the end -> go to my server -> there’s no search field, or anything that says ‘search’ -> [I know that this is because my window is too narrow] -> expand the window -> paste into the revealed search field -> click ‘follow’ on the result -> Phew!
Now I have to do this again for the other accounts…
I’m absolutely sure people become lost and give up at every step here.
Example: https://i.imgur.com/MG1d5kV.jpg
There are about 23,000 fediverse servers online today. The mastodon.social instance is the largest, with about 1/5th of the monthly active users. The other 23,000 servers with the remaining 80% of users won't benefit nearly so much from that hacky feature.
Alas didn't go anywhere. Now nearly 20 years later many companies (amazon, netflix, bbc) still struggle with live streaming at scale
tennis@sports.bbc, italy@foreignaffairs.bbc, you name it. They can implement combination feeds by making sports@news.bbc boost all the individual categories, so people can easily find the specific types of news they're interested in.
In the end I think they'll keep down the variety, sticking to a Twitter like experience.
Couple questions:
There's a .bbc TLD? Being used anywhere else? TIL
Who is hosting their instance - is it a third-party or did they spin up their own?
alpha.bbc, labs.bbc, nic.bbc, taster.bbc, the.bbc, to.bbc. nic.bbc is the only one that resolves, I'd asusme the rest are for internal R&D projects and QA links.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/820849/response/19688...
I suppose a lot of people (also parsers) wouldn't realise it was a URL.
I suppose it's better than silently subjecting it to a six-month probation period, but I can't imagine it is so expensive to maintain (and use as a mirror for their Twitter etc) that they need the probation period at all. And if in six months the BBC publicly pronounce that they don't see the value in Mastodon it will probably be a net negative for the Fediverse.
I think that this is going to be a problem in the medium term, though, unless actual people at the BBC start getting accounts. It will end up as a slightly depressing node full of robots, which perception will then have to be overcome.
In the news space maybe, but the European Union and the Dutch government already have their own instances.
- You own your account, but not the infra. I'm sure that BBC can manage to run Mastodon by throwing resources at it, but still...not needing to do that at all is appealing.
- You don't have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there's barely anything to moderate. When a nutjob replies to your tweet, you're not responsible for it. Nor are you responsible for the handling of personal data of people replying. All of this is not your problem, which is nice.
- For the time being, centralized social media has superior reach potential, not just because of the bigger audience potential, your account is also vastly easier to discover through search and algorithms. As an example, BBC world news has 40M followers on Twitter, whilst on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is exceptionally rare.
- Federation/defederation wars may reduce your reach even further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it's typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a big thing on Mastodon.
Bottom line is that you're adding operational and legal headaches with very little to show for it in comparison to the big networks.
Mastodon imho desperately needs proper multi-tenancy, i.e. bring your own domain, separate handles, some settings customization, without needing to run whole another instance of the server. We already found out in the 90s that vhosting is useful for stuff like web and email. This would open the door for people to better offer Mastodon-as-a-service.
Yes, defederation is per instance but cuts of all users of that instance from BBC. Here's a fresh example:
https://social.anoxinon.de/@Curator@mastodon.art/11080988949...
Pretty large instance that defederated before BBC even started.
I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon. Are there actually accounts with more than 100K followers? If so who?
EDIT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1cpUKkoT1MUn8_xM4... has a list of the big ones, looks like https://mastodon.social/mastodon is top at 800k.
> I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon
https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats says currently 2 million active monthly users, 9 million registered. That's just for Mastodon, so add another couple of million for the rest of the Fediverse.
This is the future.
1. Finding the string you have to search for of the BBC account
2. Opening up their home instance
3. Going to the terrible search menu
4. Pasting the identifying string of the instance
5. Hoping the search doesn't bug out
6. Clicking follow and hoping the request doesn't bug out and remain in pending for months (yes, this happens)
Instead of the process on 'traditional' social media which is:
1. Click the big shiny button
Why they haven't yet fixed this glaring UX flaw using something like URL protocols is astonishing. I guess this is why technical people shouldn't design products. Nobody cares how it is built if it offers only friction to the end user.
Granted, there are a lot of rough edges around the UX of Mastodon but pasting a url into a form field is at worst mildly annoying.
One problem I have with decentralization (and this is almost a nitpick) is how complex the mental model of those things are. Who decides which books exist on Bookwyrm? Who stores the reviews? etc etc. It's quite exhausting actually.
I'm sure once one "wins" and you get used to it it's not an issue, but I think this friction is an issue for adoption.
It's a subtle, but very nice feature. This is how ActivityPub should be used.
Feels like a few communities moved over, but most stuff has moved back to twitter.
In practice Mastodon doesn't seem to support the ability to actually be social.
I clicked a Mastodon link on my iPhone the other other day, it opened in Safari.
I wanted to interact with the Post. But I couldn't as I wasn't logged in. So I went to login, but of course it wasn't my instance.
I'd then have needed to copy the post URL, login to my instance, and share it or do whatever you have to do in Mastodon. I moved onto other things, the process broke my flow.
The TLDR is that Mastodon creates too much friction to be actually work as a decentralised social network. My prediction is that It'll end up as another Twitter clone focused around a small number of major instances.
An OSS Twitter clone might be a good thing, but then it might not. Running a Social Network is hard.
Automated federated filtering is not impossible. In fact, an distributed setup (where volunteers host image/text classifiers) like AI Horde already does seems pretty doable.
> Unlike most Mastodon servers where you can sign up for a personal account, we're only using this instance to host BBC accounts; it’s a place for us to publish in the Fediverse. If you have a Mastodon (or other ActivityPub) account from another server, then you can easily follow our accounts.
So if there's CSAM, it's coming from the BBC itself, which is hopefully unlikely.
And the fediverse / Mastodon already takes care of filtering. Niche instances failing to police CSAM are defederated by mainstream instances, which means they're unreachable to anyone on the mainstream instances. This could be improved and automation tools for use by moderators are certainly welcome, but generally speaking as a user you're not going to see objectionable content unless you go looking for it or your admin is negligent.
edit: typo
honestly, what genuine use does something like twitter, mastodon, instagram etc have? No one even reads the shit other people post, they just use it to hook into their own material.
fucking weird world we live in now, where 90% of the population appears to be a narcissist.
For me I'm on mastodon to shitpost, discuss media with friends, my account is locked and I only allow followers who give off good vibes. There is nothing narcistic about it, it isn't even tied to my IRL identity.
The problem you mention is a huge one with modern social media, and I think that it is exacerbated by the perverse incentives of engagement (ad) driven monetization. But there are healthier ways to use social media, and shifting data ownership away from a centralized oligopoly to a federated, decentralized model is a step in the right direction
I tend to distinguish social media from internet fora in that, social media is user-centric. You follow people. But a forum is topic-centric. You follow a discussion group with a specific purpose, and it's an implementation detail if it's hosted on a dedicated website, or a mailing list, or a newsgroup, or a subreddit.
HN could be alt.news.ycombinator, or /r/hackernews. It isn't @hackernews, or... whatever facebook does. I definitely lean towards thinking of HN as a forum, rather than a brand of social media.
Do you think that's a meaningful distinction?
At least this is what I say to myself when I get depressed we are living in the 21st Century World and people care more about letting men inside women's bathrooms than the fact the US and its "allies" just bombed the Nordstream pipeline that will have a negative effect on millions of Europeans... and how I will be downvoted (2718 currently) for posting this. But, at least you are not alone "uhtred".
You can follow friends and see what they are saying throughout the day, and maybe converse with them, in a lower-commitment manner than having a private chat with just them. Their other friends might be part of this conversation too. Maybe some of their other friends will become your friend too.
You have to have some friends first though. If you don't have any then I could easily see how it looks useless.
Do you post a status update telling all your "friends" that you stubbed your toe and then feel depressed when you don't get many heart emojis?
Or do you post a really witty observation about something in the news, so witty you spent all morning thinking of it, and then get depressed when no one reposts it?
sure though, you only use it to communicate with your friends.
Their moves into wider media, beyond TV and radio, are all about ensuring they can send their propaganda as far and as wide as possible, and nothing more.
Modern traditional media is barely any better than social media these days anyway. It ranges from blatantly biased (e.g. Daily Mail, Telegraph) to the BBC which is only unbiased when it suits them. Just as you can't believe everything you read on the internet, you can't believe everything the BBC tells you either (assuming they even bother to tell you in the first place .... see their silence about Michelle Mone and PPE for example, the BBC were silent when the story was reported in full everywhere else).
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04jqjcj
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3qBWQnDDTFKhHQkwRv...
Except they are not.
It is amazing, for example, how many times the BBC conveniently fails to correctly attribute an interviewee.
So many times somebody is given a generic job title when they are actually working for a political lobby organisation for example.
I don't think this is the thread best suited for excreting your obvious pent-up anger
