We are going to continue our trial here for at least another six months while we share our findings internally and seek more engagement from other BBC teams. We are also planning to start researching ways to publish more BBC content using ActivityPub.
Just a reminder that, in case you don’t already, you can follow our R&D colleagues who work on news innovation - @BBC_News_Labs - and our team creating digital tools for creators to explore: @Connected_Studio
And for more regular updates, our colleagues at @BBCRadio4 and @BBC5Live bring you the best of what’s happening on those radio networks!
@BBCRD@BBC_News_Labs@Connected_Studio@BBCRadio4@BBC5Live I get wanting to think about News feeds carefully first but one thing I'm curious about is that I have a couple of bot accounts fed from different BBC News RSS feeds, and I know I'm not the only one
Do you have any feel for how many such mirror accounts there might be? I think that sort of discovery can be hard on the Fediverse but can you tell from the web server logs?
In truth, it has been pretty disappointing to see rather limited engagement by the BBC accounts. There was quite a lot of excitement when BBC joined Mastodon but the accounts do not post regularly, and there isn't an official BBC News or BBC World account which are the main areas of interest for most audiences that access BBC services. There are other official media outlets that are much more integrated on Mastodon.
@BBCRD
amazing! "So far in the trial we’ve amassed around 60,000 followers across our six trial accounts, and we have had to do very little moderation of replies associated with our content. 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."
@BBCRD Oh man, my English is bad (not a native speaker). The whole first paragraph I assumed the BBC is reporting about some Mastodon related trial at some court.
@BBCRD My general problem with the BBC is that as a state sponsored media provider, the propaganda and bias are too often visible. This is why my dad upon the end of the free TV license for over 85s packed the TV away into a box in a spare room and renewed his library card instead.
@BBCRD I suspect over at X interaction numbers can be misleading because of all the trolls and fake accounts there. You may end up with smaller numbers here, but I think you're far more likely to have real people behind those interactions. The interactions here may actually mean more.
@BBCRD I just wish the stations with accounts actually used them for engagement with the studio. Its still really weird the BBC radio stations only take comments from twitter/X now
@BBCRD Thank you, interesting. I'd be very happy if some BBC journalists with social media profiles on other platforms, for example Steve Rosenberg in Moscow, were present here as well. I very much enjoy his posts, but I do not enjoy having to use X to see them.
Topical news updates would be nice too, of course, but on the other hand we can already get them here through RSS-bots if necessary. I'm more interested in accounts I can interact with than simple news feeds.
@BBCRD Please put an official BBC World feed. if you wish to see engagement. I get an automated/robot feed for BBC News so your trial wouldn't see any engagement in your statistics.
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