All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.
For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
we have had to do very little moderation of replies associated with our content.
So you get significantly larger engagement numbers and spend less time moderating. What's left to ponder, amigo?
I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won't moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.
If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it's almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we're talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.
As for federation's future we'll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it's own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we're commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.
It's like running your own email server in the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a "shared" service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I'm afraid that eventually there might only be "outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com" so to speak, because it's just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It's a good analogy.
An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.
Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made email all work smoothly across many federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.
Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)
I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.
Outsourcing administration instead of doing it in house would be much cheaper for news orgs in the long run I'd think. Volunteer admins is one thing. Staff admins is another.
So I looked them up with my Mastodon account to try to follow but quickly discovered that not all searches for 'BBC' lead to accounts related to the BBC...l.
I like the testing and hopefully they will share more detailed research findings in the next 6months. Especially on content moderation knowing they have decades of experience on this.
We were aiming to learn about how much work and cost this involved, how many people we’d reach, what levels of engagement we would get and to explore the risks and benefits of the federated model.
The trial so far has been really effective in helping us learn about how the Fediverse is evolving, what technical support a Mastodon server needs, what the costs are, and how a large media organisation like the BBC can engage with the many different overlapping communities that exist in this rapidly changing space.
We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse.
Reassuringly, most of the comments and feedback have been positive, welcoming both our interest and the way we have set things up.We’ve had really encouraging levels of engagement(i.e. replies, re-posts and likes) on Mastodon.
Because this an experiment and a trial, it's not always the main priority for all the teams involved, so we may not be able to engage and reply as much as the Mastodon community and culture expect, and we recognise this could be an issue going forward.
Because of the potential sensitivity around news stories, we need to be particularly careful with our editorial processes and within the scope of this trial we are not in a position to guarantee time and effort from other teams outside of R&D.
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