As it says in the title, the BBC is starting its own Mastodon instance. I think the CBC (and other news networks) should do similar. Particularly with the recent passing of Bill C-18 it seems like a world where the links we share are crossposts to news organization’s own content is the perfect resolution to that whole issue.
IIUC it’s because the BBC has had some dabbling with transphobia. A few admins are inferring that their Mastodon moderation policies will be similar to their editorial practices so it’s just a matter of blocking yet another instance that has a mismatch in moderation policy.
Business as usual on Mastodon, that’s why it’s decentralized in the first place. mastodon.art users who want to participate on the social.bbc instance can just go do so using another instance.
I think that this is an important part of the future of the fediverse. News sites and the like have shitty poorly moderated comment sections that serve almost no purpose. They have the resources to sustain a large instance and like you said it lets them more easily monetize their work. It seems like wins all around if enough news outlets adopt it.
I think it would be pretty cool if I could subscribe to different CBC sections, and have it show up in my normal feeds, I think this would mitigate the biases that relying on news going viral creates without having to go to the cbc itself and scrape through it myself.
For sure. Reading through the entire cbc.ca site feels so unfeasible and exhausting. Having it actually categorized and browsable without all the attention-grabbing mega headlines would make it much more readable.
I sent a couple emails to them around the time Musk labelled them as state propaganda. They sent one reply back saying they’d forward it to whoever is in charge of social. No way to know whether or not is was just basically flushed down the toilet though. I don’t know if there’s a particular way to reach them to recommend that they set up a presence here.
I don’t really see the downside for them. A private server would be relatively low cost and it could be hosted on servers they control in Canada. Beyond an official place for their work, it also means their employees and journalists wouldn’t have to worry about where to sign up, plus give them instant account verification.
As much as I love the CBC, they always seem a bit too reluctant to lead.
Edit: Just wanted to add that it’s important to reach out to CBC any way you can. I’m not sure about other Fediverse projects but Mastodon at least uses Rel=noreferer in the header. Traffic from Mastodon users will show up in analytics as direct traffic so they can’t see how many people are originating from there.
I emailed them today. It is clear that the “free” platforms they rely on are now openly hostile to them and their users. We need to put public services back onto public infrastructure
It is unlikely they have the know-how. The OECD doesn’t call Canada the “most educated nation” because we believe in learning how to learn. We believe that one needs to be trained before they are able to do anything. At this time, it is all but certain that nobody has gone through a Fediverse/Mastadon/Lemmy college course.
I kind of agree with your premise about education vs training. But, I know someone who just finished a PhD thesis on an aspect of social media. These people are out there & could probably establish rapport without much friction. And at the end of the day, I’d say it’s better if these projects are spearheaded by people who have some wisdom about the waters that we’re going out into. Though, yeah, I share your pessimism more generally.
Maybe? I think it’s also because they’re constantly under attack from conservatives. Anything too progressive or new could make them stand out more as a target. “The Fediverse?! Look what the Liberal CBC is doing with taxpayer moneynow!” It’s maybe put them in a box where they think they can only do whatever other news or media organizations are doing.
I also think they probably underestimate the amount of support they have from Canadians too.
Yeah, could be. I’d like to see funding for the CBC maintained, and think it’s so valuable to have a national broadcaster. At the same time, can I take a moment to bellyache about CBC radio? Some of their programming makes me a bit sad. Like having a show that simply repeats podcasts produced by other people, occasionally about American news stories. There’s no reason for that to be on the airwaves in 2023. Programs like The Sunday Edition, and Writers and Company are gone, and it seems like a lot of the spoken word programs are in the weeds on fringe issues. It’s just not the first preset on my dial anymore. And it’s too bad because I used to really look forward to tuning in. Maybe radio is dying, I don’t know.
There’s no reason for that to be on the airwaves in 2023.
Why’s that? A radio show that curates the best of other radio shows is a perfectly fine use of the medium. In fact, it makes a lot of sense as if you like listening to one radio show you will probably like listening to others as well.
Programs like The Sunday Edition, and Writers and Company are gone
Huh? Writers and Company is still there, and is streamed to legacy devices on Sunday at 3PM.
Maybe radio is dying, I don’t know.
Quite the opposite. It is alive and well. That show you spoke of earlier being able to regularly find new content from other radio programs to present to the audience is telling about just how strong radio is. If radio was dying, that show would have died long ago.
Speaking specifically about the ‘Podcast Playlist’ show - while I don’t disagree that it can be an interesting nexus for new information, I don’t think it needs to be on the air at all. If the objective is curation, that could easily and more effectively be done via an online feed where the shows are actually hyperlinked, tagged, & made accessible. I’m not a radio producer so, grain of salt. But from my armchair, seems to me that the CBC should aspire to something higher than ‘content aggregation’ or rebroadcasting material from other stations. I expect that sort of thing from a donation funded campus & community radio station where maybe someone isn’t in the booth at 2am, but not from a national broadcaster that receives funding from Canadian taxpayers.
With Writers & Company, I was referring to the host stepping down. I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, she kind of was the show in a sense. AFAIK there won’t be any new episodes, and that’s a loss.
More broadly, I like that Canada has a national broadcaster, I just think it could be better.
If the objective is curation, that could easily and more effectively be done via an online feed
Well, it is, just like every other CBC Radio program. Podcasts is the business they are in.
The OTA broadcast is there merely to stream the same content out to legacy devices which are not compatible with the modern feeds. If it were a campus/community run venture, even if it were a commercially run venture, they would no doubt only offer the feed, but as they have taxpayer support they are also able to accommodate those who are unable or unwilling to adopt newer devices.
Now, maybe there is a case to be made that the program isn’t worth producing for any medium, but I don’t have listenership data to delve into that. It would not surprise me if a lot of people enjoy it, though. It seems far less niche than Writers and Company. Assuming it is well received, that is a pretty good reason to produce it.
she kind of was the show in a sense.
Fair. Hard to lament someone wanting to move on with their life, though. That show has been on the air seemingly forever. It is not like Podcast Playlist is displacing it. They have been produced in parallel. Its actual replacement is yet to come – and it might be even better!
When the CBC was label as propaganda on the platform formerly know as Twitter, didn’t the CBC say they were going to be involved in decentralized social media?
It’s kind of ironic, because a massive reason for the enshittification of Twitter is Musk’s rampant transphobia, and the BBC is famous among the trans community for platforming transphobes. I’d have thought they’d be perfectly happy to stay on Twitter.
I mean, there’s a lot more wrong with Twitter than just transphobia, but you can trace it back there. It was a big part of the “free speech” argument that transphobes were getting silenced, which is what drove Musk to want to own the site, and also drove him down the right-wing-identity-politics rabbit hole that turned him into the wingnut he is today. That and anti-COVID measures hurting his bottom line.
Musk was not “turned into” a wingnut. He “always was” a wingnut. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find him being a contentious, antisocial prick from his youth onward. It’s just that the richer he got the more people looked.
The involvement of the BBC encouraged me to finally figure it out. And now I REALLY want a CBC one. They could have a feed per show, all hosted internally. It’s a no-brainer.
The difference here being that a CBC instance wouldn’t have to follow dumb rules … they’d make up their own so the racists, multi-phobics, etc wouldn’t have much of a platform.
Seriously, who are these people commenting on CBC articles? I don’t usually even look at the comments anymore, simply because any time I did, they were full of the shittiest, dumbest assholes I’ve ever seen. I’m embarrassed to even share a country with people who comment on CBC articles.
By comparison, comments on Reddit and Lemmy are usually okay. Not good by any means (especially in the right leaning mess that was r/Canada), but miles better than CBC’s comments (which I can only assume are completely unmoderated).
100% agree. Now they are free of catering to a billionaire’s gamed anti-democratic algorithms. There’s an opportunity to get back to REAL news reporting again.
I agree. Hosting a “Twitter” alternative yourself that you can control. And bringing news to people on other platforms. You need big players on the alternative platforms to make them viable for more people.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
Some instances (at least mastodon.art) are already blocking them.
https://mastodon.art/@Curator/110809888584495290
What’s the reason to block them? Doesn’t it genuinely expand the fediverse?
If you read the linked thread, it’s because of the BBC’s increased bigotry toward LGBT+ people over the past few years.
IIUC it’s because the BBC has had some dabbling with transphobia. A few admins are inferring that their Mastodon moderation policies will be similar to their editorial practices so it’s just a matter of blocking yet another instance that has a mismatch in moderation policy.
Business as usual on Mastodon, that’s why it’s decentralized in the first place.
mastodon.artusers who want to participate on thesocial.bbcinstance can just go do so using another instance.I don’t know. We already have mstdn.ca and it is free (as in speech) and supported by CIRA.
They would be fulfilling different roles. The social.bbc site isn’t going to be open to the public but rather specific to BBC content and journalists.
Plus an account in a potential social.cbc.ca domain has the advantage that you know automatically that it’s a legit CBC account.
Yep, that is huge.
Ah true! I didn’t think of it that way. I kind of forgot how the whole federation thing worked for a second there lol.
I think that this is an important part of the future of the fediverse. News sites and the like have shitty poorly moderated comment sections that serve almost no purpose. They have the resources to sustain a large instance and like you said it lets them more easily monetize their work. It seems like wins all around if enough news outlets adopt it.
I think it would be pretty cool if I could subscribe to different CBC sections, and have it show up in my normal feeds, I think this would mitigate the biases that relying on news going viral creates without having to go to the cbc itself and scrape through it myself.
This is so much better than relying on tweeter assuming it can be medium for some sort of commons!
Plus, free RSS!
(For the five of us that still care about that, anyway.)
There are dozens of us!
Dozens!
Almost 50!
RSS forever!
For sure. Reading through the entire cbc.ca site feels so unfeasible and exhausting. Having it actually categorized and browsable without all the attention-grabbing mega headlines would make it much more readable.
Don’t click on a CBC app video link either, you will have to watch 30 seconds of ads before the article…EVERY TIME.
Do you not have uBlock Origin?
Does not work on the app. I use it otherwise.
@SlikPikker Would using an RSS reader help with navigation? Allows you to follow CBC News without having to dig through their website.
You can find the RSS list here: https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
Thanks, I’ll check it out. It might help yeah.
Yes, I think this is really the future. I remember there was a country that was also planning to make their own instance in the fediverse as well.
Yeah, this is such a great thing. Really hope CBC takes note and follows.
Also, hope this is a success.
I sent a couple emails to them around the time Musk labelled them as state propaganda. They sent one reply back saying they’d forward it to whoever is in charge of social. No way to know whether or not is was just basically flushed down the toilet though. I don’t know if there’s a particular way to reach them to recommend that they set up a presence here.
I don’t really see the downside for them. A private server would be relatively low cost and it could be hosted on servers they control in Canada. Beyond an official place for their work, it also means their employees and journalists wouldn’t have to worry about where to sign up, plus give them instant account verification.
As much as I love the CBC, they always seem a bit too reluctant to lead.
Edit: Just wanted to add that it’s important to reach out to CBC any way you can. I’m not sure about other Fediverse projects but Mastodon at least uses Rel=noreferer in the header. Traffic from Mastodon users will show up in analytics as direct traffic so they can’t see how many people are originating from there.
I emailed them today. It is clear that the “free” platforms they rely on are now openly hostile to them and their users. We need to put public services back onto public infrastructure
I sent them a note via their feedback form too. If we all do that they might start paying attention.
It is unlikely they have the know-how. The OECD doesn’t call Canada the “most educated nation” because we believe in learning how to learn. We believe that one needs to be trained before they are able to do anything. At this time, it is all but certain that nobody has gone through a Fediverse/Mastadon/Lemmy college course.
I kind of agree with your premise about education vs training. But, I know someone who just finished a PhD thesis on an aspect of social media. These people are out there & could probably establish rapport without much friction. And at the end of the day, I’d say it’s better if these projects are spearheaded by people who have some wisdom about the waters that we’re going out into. Though, yeah, I share your pessimism more generally.
I know it’s a cliche, but I wonder if that’s a ‘Canadian’ thing.
Maybe? I think it’s also because they’re constantly under attack from conservatives. Anything too progressive or new could make them stand out more as a target. “The Fediverse?! Look what the Liberal CBC is doing with taxpayer money now!” It’s maybe put them in a box where they think they can only do whatever other news or media organizations are doing.
I also think they probably underestimate the amount of support they have from Canadians too.
Yeah, could be. I’d like to see funding for the CBC maintained, and think it’s so valuable to have a national broadcaster. At the same time, can I take a moment to bellyache about CBC radio? Some of their programming makes me a bit sad. Like having a show that simply repeats podcasts produced by other people, occasionally about American news stories. There’s no reason for that to be on the airwaves in 2023. Programs like The Sunday Edition, and Writers and Company are gone, and it seems like a lot of the spoken word programs are in the weeds on fringe issues. It’s just not the first preset on my dial anymore. And it’s too bad because I used to really look forward to tuning in. Maybe radio is dying, I don’t know.
Why’s that? A radio show that curates the best of other radio shows is a perfectly fine use of the medium. In fact, it makes a lot of sense as if you like listening to one radio show you will probably like listening to others as well.
Huh? Writers and Company is still there, and is streamed to legacy devices on Sunday at 3PM.
Quite the opposite. It is alive and well. That show you spoke of earlier being able to regularly find new content from other radio programs to present to the audience is telling about just how strong radio is. If radio was dying, that show would have died long ago.
Speaking specifically about the ‘Podcast Playlist’ show - while I don’t disagree that it can be an interesting nexus for new information, I don’t think it needs to be on the air at all. If the objective is curation, that could easily and more effectively be done via an online feed where the shows are actually hyperlinked, tagged, & made accessible. I’m not a radio producer so, grain of salt. But from my armchair, seems to me that the CBC should aspire to something higher than ‘content aggregation’ or rebroadcasting material from other stations. I expect that sort of thing from a donation funded campus & community radio station where maybe someone isn’t in the booth at 2am, but not from a national broadcaster that receives funding from Canadian taxpayers.
With Writers & Company, I was referring to the host stepping down. I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, she kind of was the show in a sense. AFAIK there won’t be any new episodes, and that’s a loss.
More broadly, I like that Canada has a national broadcaster, I just think it could be better.
Well, it is, just like every other CBC Radio program. Podcasts is the business they are in.
The OTA broadcast is there merely to stream the same content out to legacy devices which are not compatible with the modern feeds. If it were a campus/community run venture, even if it were a commercially run venture, they would no doubt only offer the feed, but as they have taxpayer support they are also able to accommodate those who are unable or unwilling to adopt newer devices.
Now, maybe there is a case to be made that the program isn’t worth producing for any medium, but I don’t have listenership data to delve into that. It would not surprise me if a lot of people enjoy it, though. It seems far less niche than Writers and Company. Assuming it is well received, that is a pretty good reason to produce it.
Fair. Hard to lament someone wanting to move on with their life, though. That show has been on the air seemingly forever. It is not like Podcast Playlist is displacing it. They have been produced in parallel. Its actual replacement is yet to come – and it might be even better!
When the CBC was label as propaganda on the platform formerly know as Twitter, didn’t the CBC say they were going to be involved in decentralized social media?
It’s kind of ironic, because a massive reason for the enshittification of Twitter is Musk’s rampant transphobia, and the BBC is famous among the trans community for platforming transphobes. I’d have thought they’d be perfectly happy to stay on Twitter.
I mean, there’s a lot more wrong with Twitter than just transphobia, but you can trace it back there. It was a big part of the “free speech” argument that transphobes were getting silenced, which is what drove Musk to want to own the site, and also drove him down the right-wing-identity-politics rabbit hole that turned him into the wingnut he is today. That and anti-COVID measures hurting his bottom line.
Musk was not “turned into” a wingnut. He “always was” a wingnut. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find him being a contentious, antisocial prick from his youth onward. It’s just that the richer he got the more people looked.
Also being openly asshole was not a proven model pre-Trump so most assholes showed some restraint in public
The involvement of the BBC encouraged me to finally figure it out. And now I REALLY want a CBC one. They could have a feed per show, all hosted internally. It’s a no-brainer.
I’d get back to listening “The Secret Life of Canada” podcast if there was an active lemmy community for it :-P
idk if I want an entire instance made up of CBC commenters.
@Tired8281 @grte
The difference here being that a CBC instance wouldn’t have to follow dumb rules … they’d make up their own so the racists, multi-phobics, etc wouldn’t have much of a platform.
Seriously, who are these people commenting on CBC articles? I don’t usually even look at the comments anymore, simply because any time I did, they were full of the shittiest, dumbest assholes I’ve ever seen. I’m embarrassed to even share a country with people who comment on CBC articles.
By comparison, comments on Reddit and Lemmy are usually okay. Not good by any means (especially in the right leaning mess that was r/Canada), but miles better than CBC’s comments (which I can only assume are completely unmoderated).
There always seem to be 2. The real answer is in the comments (Reddit/Lemmy), and the comments are worth ignoring (Cbc/CTV/Facebook)
Maybe most of them won’t figure out how to login here. Especially if they force 2fa.
Yeah, tell me about it. The dumbest thing the CBC ever did was open up to comments.
100% agree. Now they are free of catering to a billionaire’s gamed anti-democratic algorithms. There’s an opportunity to get back to REAL news reporting again.
The possessive pronoun is “its”. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”.
Thank you for the correction.
Very cool! I’m hoping that other news organizations follow suit.
I agree. Hosting a “Twitter” alternative yourself that you can control. And bringing news to people on other platforms. You need big players on the alternative platforms to make them viable for more people.
This seems very awesome! I’d love to see them go as far as having their own Lemmy instance too!
I feel this move helps legitimize Mastodon in a way that other companies follow suit to get away from the mess that twitter is now.
The Dutch government and the city of Amsterdam have their own instance too.