It’s like running your own email server in the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a “shared” service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I’m afraid that eventually there might only be “outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com” so to speak, because it’s just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It’s a good analogy.
An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.
Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made email all work smoothly across many federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.
Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)
I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.
Humm, they do charge for some options like the "business account" but have blocked even allowing you to use an email reader that is not theirs. I know, I've been trying use all the things that used to be free...
If you go to another domain (or even one of your own), you can still talk to all the people who use GMail.
Maybe GMail should choose to defederate, so GMail accounts would no longer be able to receive from or send emails to non-GMail accounts. Then maybe they could trap people and charge more.
Outsourcing administration instead of doing it in house would be much cheaper for news orgs in the long run I'd think. Volunteer admins is one thing. Staff admins is another.
So I looked them up with my Mastodon account to try to follow but quickly discovered that not all searches for ‘BBC’ lead to accounts related to the BBC…l.
I like the testing and hopefully they will share more detailed research findings in the next 6months. Especially on content moderation knowing they have decades of experience on this.
We were aiming to learn about how much work and cost this involved, how many people we’d reach, what levels of engagement we would get and to explore the risks and benefits of the federated model.
The trial so far has been really effective in helping us learn about how the Fediverse is evolving, what technical support a Mastodon server needs, what the costs are, and how a large media organisation like the BBC can engage with the many different overlapping communities that exist in this rapidly changing space.
We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse.
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.
Because this an experiment and a trial, it’s not always the main priority for all the teams involved, so we may not be able to engage and reply as much as the Mastodon community and culture expect, and we recognise this could be an issue going forward.
Because of the potential sensitivity around news stories, we need to be particularly careful with our editorial processes and within the scope of this trial we are not in a position to guarantee time and effort from other teams outside of R&D.
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They are very fierce at censoring their IP material, anything that lands on youtube that hasn’t been altered to avoid copyright bot, gets taken down immediately. even shows that have aired the same day.
I was using it earlier and it seems to struggle with downloading anything higher than 720p. Although I’m not really fussed about the resolution of Live at the Apollo episodes.
For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
I don’t do “Twitter style” social media much but when I did use my Mastodon account I found significant engagement. On Twitter my posts were invisible, but on Mastodon people found, liked, and commented on them. Conversation were good as well.
I was a beta tester for BlueSky and I found the same “invisibility” problem there. Same posts on Mastodon, Twitter, and Blue Sky and only the Mastodon ones generated responses or any acknowledgement for that matter.
The BBC’s iPlayer streaming service is to end downloads for users who watch on desktop or laptop computers.
Currently viewers on PCs and Macs can save programmes via the iPlayer Downloads app, but that will be closed.
“This does not affect downloads on the BBC iPlayer mobile or tablet apps and viewers can continue to stream programmes on BBC iPlayer on their PCs and Macs,” a spokesperson added.
The corporation declined to reveal how many people would be affected by the closure of downloads for users of desktops and laptops, but the decision has attracted some criticism.
And former BBC Journalist Robert Rea wrote: "This strikes me as a very bad move.
Figures released last year show traditional TV viewing had its sharpest ever decline in 2022, according to the latest annual survey of UK media consumption by broadcasting watchdog Ofcom.
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