Canada

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 the start of the use cases I wanted to see take off with Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin. Much like the previous era of distributed content with user-hosted voice servers and forums, having larger communities/organizations run their own instances and avoid trying to treat the space as one big pool of content is the real use case here. The fact that you can cross-instance subscribe and post makes it viable long-term.

It also gives "free" verification of information's sources based on the domain, the same way that (modern) email gives you an extra layer of confidence when you see a verified domain. I would love the see the Government of Canada, CBC, Universities, all starting their own instances and utilizing them in unique and interesting ways. With enough adoption, official provincial/municipality instances could pop up to make organized communities easier.

It feels to me like a starting move away from the autocracy that the platform economy has created. It's not universal, but I absolutely push back against too many instances trying to be "general purpose Reddit replacements" because that seems like a fleeting use case for what it can eventually become, and it just confuses the whole abstraction of what these decentralized socials afford.

This is very intriguing.... I actually work in CBC (nowhere near content or with the social media people who'd make these kinds of decisions), but as a developer I get 20% time to dabble with anything I think might be useful. I haven't used it in a while, but a CBC ActivityPub instance may be just the right project, especially if it can auto-publish our content from the same feeds that power our site.

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.

idk if I want an entire instance made up of CBC commenters.

The possessive pronoun is "its". "It's" is a contraction of "it is".

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.

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.

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.

This is good in some ways and I welcome the BBC to the fediverse as an important step to universal acceptance. It's far better than using flaky bridges from other social networks.

What is disappointing is the very small range of content provided so far, Radio 4 & 5 plus some curiosities. I'd hoped for the excellent 6 Music channel. Let's see if they keep up with the sports in particular on 5. I'm glad that it's divided by station / topic so I can follow only what interests me.

I too would like more national broadcasters to get onboard. CBC I'm sure have some interesting content to share with the world, as do ABC, RTE, NZBC, others? I'd love to have culture from across the globe, which is the real value for Mastodon for me rather than as a news feed.

Some instances (at least mastodon.art) are already blocking them.

https://mastodon.art/@Curator/110809888584495290

Very cool! I'm hoping that other news organizations follow suit.

I didn't know about the BBC thing, that's a pretty big deal for the fediverse. A question though, in the linked BBC article, it seems like they're heavily relying on moderation to come from the home instance of anyone who posts a reply to a BBC post. If a self hosted troll server decides to start aggressively spamming these media accounts, or posts illegal material as replies to their posts, what could a media organization do to stop it? Is there any protection against say a wide network of troll servers working together?

Traditional social media at least theoretically has a better ability to shut this sort of activity down because they can see the whole picture of user activity and use algorithms to discover and ban bots. I worry that decentralization itself will become an attack vector for malicious activity.

Great move on the part of the BBC. Given all the issues on Twitter, hopefully the CBC will also make a move to Mastodon. I recall when Her Excellency the Right Honourable Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada, closed comments on Twitter due to abusive garbage, that I wrote her office and suggested Mastodon. Alas, they did not follow through. But hopefully this move from the BBC will inspire some of our Canadian institutions (particularly the CBC) to reconsider and to make the move to the fediverse.

This is great to see. They cite moderation as a concern. Turning off replies to all posts could help reduce that burden.

Yeah, this is such a great thing. Really hope CBC takes note and follows.

Also, hope this is a success.