“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point.”
I think the USA’s National Weather Service Twitter presence is a good example.
If you look deep enough you’ll see caveats like “supplemental service provided by NWS” and “Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information”, but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.
That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:
Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly ‘social media’ style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won’t be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.
Finally: if you’re reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you’d like a fediverse presence, I did!
Thanks for the details
Good idea! I just emailed NWS.PA@noaa.gov to ask them not only for a Mastodon instance to replace this stuff, but also for a PeerTube instance to replace https://www.youtube.com/@noaanationalweatherservice .