BBC joins the Mastodon social media platform

As the UK’s national broadcaster, the BBC has a set objective of making its content available both to UK citizens and around the world. They’ve been an early adopter of social media, online streaming, podcasting and many other technologies that can help them be widely reachable.

Now, the research and development team within the BBC have started a six month trial of Mastodon since it’s fast gaining adoption - mostly as a result of the changes at Twitter (now known as X.com) since it was taken over by Elon Musk late last year.

This is a major move by a world-renowned media outlet. It’s a small step - mostly focused on two of their radio stations - but still a great indication that they see this as being a growing social network and a viable way to reach people.

The BBC News Twitter accounts, especially its @BBCBreaking account with over 50 million followers, have historically been one of the first ways in which many people have gotten access to news as it happens. If they replicate the content they already make to other social networks that could be a huge win for the group of open source projects, like Mastodon, known commonly as the Fediverse.

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Brands no longer want to be associated with Twitter

Since the end of 2022, a huge number of advertisers and users have started to leave Twitter, as a result of changes and decisions being taken by its new management.

Along with a growing amount of far-right content and crypto-currency scam bots, changes to the account verification process at Twitter meant that brands and organizations like the BBC lost, and then regained at a much higher cost, access to a vital way to prove their identity.

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Proving your social media identity

One of the main benefits of decentralized social media like Mastodon is that companies, brands, or even individuals, can use their own domain names to host their online presence. The BBC, for example, have chosen to host their Mastodon service on https://social.bbc - this is a great way of proving that their posts are genuine, and can be trusted in the same way as other BBC content.

At mastodon.site, we specialize in helping users and businesses bring their domain name to their own Mastodon server, just as the BBC have done here. Trust and verification are crucial elements of safe and useful social media interactions, so the mechanisms already built into owning a domain name are a great way forward.

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The BBC’s future on Mastodon

As it’s only a six month trial, it’s hard to know exactly what will come of bbc.social just yet. Their two radio channel accounts, @BBCRadio4 and @BBC5Live are currently close to 20,000 followers between them. This might be a lot for a Mastodon server but is a fraction of their reach on Twitter.

The time, effort and cost of running a small server with a high follower count is also not to be overlooked - it’s a non-trivial effort if done in-house, rather than using a managed Mastodon service like mastodon.site. This might prove too much effort for the reward for the R&D team who have other responsibilities.

We’re looking forward to seeing how this goes, and if you want to help them succeed, check out their pages and give them a follow.