The BBC has launched their own Mastodon Server

[Kisai]

20 hours ago, htimsenyawed said:

 

I think it didn't take off because it's too complicated for the average person. People are use to making an account and having access to all of it, not making or joining instances.

Mastodon didn't take off because people don't understand what "fediverse" stuff is. So instead of creating account somewhere, people are under the belief they need to create an account on every "fediverse" just to make sure nobody camps their username.

 

Whoops, didn't think that through did you social media apps?

 

The true, proper, fix for social media is to what Discord originally did and use a discriminator bit (eg unicode emoji's) so people aren't trying to sit on or trade usernames like they do with domain names. Which by the way is the same problem.

 

Domain names became something of "monopoly" property, where every brand has to buy every TLD to avoid some troll or bad-faith usage of their brand. OOPS, didn't think that through? All adding more TLD's did was make people who have money buy their brand again, and people who don't have that much money have to settle for these crappier TLD's.

 

Like when people mention "tiktok" or "facebook" they think of the mobile app, not the dot com. If you don't have the dot com, then you aren't a legitimate site.

 

The problem has always been that people don't remember useless information. The internet would function a lot better if there was no financial incentive to camp things. Like people find websites mostly through search, not by remembering the domain name, so does it really matter what the domain name is? That is the point about the discord discriminator, that discord decided to throw away in favor of the name-camping real estate game.

 

For people, (not businesses) , you should only be able to mutually "follow" people you physically have met and know them to be who they say they are. For businesses/brands/fictitious-entities (such as characters in video games) you clearly can't verify who operates them. Thus the way to verify such things is by using your circle of trust (the people you have physically met) to confirm that fictitious entity is the same one. 

 

News/Journalist entities are one of those gateways into determining if an entity is real or not. People who work for the company/entity provide that verification that the entity is real, not the other way around.

 

But it's so complicated. People just want to follow their favorite people on the internet, and don't want to have to jump through hurdles to get onto that service (see how gmail evolved and bluesky is doing the same) , and nor do they want to have to use their real name just to interact with them, because they want to be a fan of a certain person or brand without their family and real life friends judging them for it.