BlackRoseThe BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
Mysteriarch ☀️Seems like the right approach to start their own server, instead of making accounts on some of the flagship instances, which only perpetuates the centralisation dogma.
When I joined Mastodon in the November migration, I wondered why media organisations weren’t spinning up their own servers. Give all the journos an account on that server and there’s your verification right away.
Because a company/org specific site for journalists doesn’t get the interactions with people outside that org but within the sector of coverage unless people do a lot of following of others.
Compare mastodon.energy/public/local with social.bbc/public/local
Journalists want the first - not the second.
But note also that the first one isn’t associated with a media organization but rather an industry sector.
You can use social.bbc to broadcasts articles that people want to read, but the “what is going on with the energy grid in the UK” will never show up in local there but rather over at mastodon.energy/@EarthOrgUK … and so that’s where the journalists are… though there’s still a lot going on over at twitter.com/search?q=%23energytwitter
Local isn't a good measure here, though. The BBC local stream is literally just going to be posts by BBC employees.
The global stream isn't a great measure, either, frankly, as journalists primarily want to yet their posts seen, not see a huge field of noise. Those who are doing digging for social media stories maybe want a wider cut of things, but they can still do that through their replies, and through global. Search just isn't going to be as effective as on generalist servers.
But then, search isn't super effective on Mastodon, anyway, and all the big generalist servers are running Mastodon.
There's nothing preventing them from using secondary accounts on .social for research, though.