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.
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.
@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/
Don’t click on a CBC app video link either, you will have to watch 30 seconds of ads before the article…EVERY TIME.
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.
Also, you might want to take a look at https://zdf.social/@ZDF and https://ard.social/
ZDF and ARD are the two biggest broadcasters in Germany, and they both have their own ActivityPub (Mastodon) server.
In case you needed some extra convincing that other large mainstream news organisations also have realised that this is actually a good idea that makes sense ;)
A big news org from France is also on Mastodon with like 50k followers, but I cannot remember the name right now
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca) , one of the co-authors of ActivityPub is super interest in getting Canadian news organisations on board the fediverse. He gave a talk about that last night actually: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/110809723914430376
If you’re serious about this, you could totally reach out to him, I’m sure he would love to hear from people in CBC
@wisdomchicken @Hazzard absolutely! Hazzard, I’d love to discuss!
gods tagging someone’s masto directly from lemmy, and them being able to directly respond via masto is just so fucking nice
@evan @wisdomchicken @Hazzard I’m afraid that I missed your talk on ActivityPub, Evan. Do you know if a replay is available somewhere?
Yes, this can actually be done. There’s a tool called #MastoFeed that allows you to post RSS content to the fediverse. Some publications like #DarkReading are exploring using MastoFeed to publish their articles.
Their account can be found here: https://infosec.town/@darkreading
That being said, not sure if a bot account is what people are hoping for if #CBC decides to join the fediverse…
News publishers like BBC and CBC could also repurpose their RSS feeds, by creating individual accounts on their own Mastodon for each of the topics and make the same rss content available through there. This would make it easy for users to sub to news they are interested in: https://www.cbc.ca/rss/
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.
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).
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.
