The Twitter competitor Mastodon has been adopted on an experimental basis by the BBC, the Verge reports.
The BBC has decided to run its server for 6 months to see if it is viable. It can be found at social.bbc. The news organization declared that having greater control over its content was more in line with its stated mission. However, many analysts have declared Mastodon as “more trouble than it’s worth”, especially since other servers have been rife with Child Sexual Exploitation Material.
Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform, similar in some ways to Slack and Discord. A host provides the server and can post directly or allow others to post as well. Users can comment as well.
While this allows for closer moderation, it also siloes content into multiple feeds, preventing users from accessing a wider user base such as with Twitter/X, Threads, or Facebook.
With rapid changes in the social media space, especially with Twitter’s rebranding into X and Meta’s launch of Threads, users are pulled into various directions.