In July 2023 we announced our plan to establish a ±«Óãtv presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols, as part of our research into social technologies. The experimental ±«Óãtv Mastodon server at has now been running for six months and hosts accounts for R&D, Radio 4, and 5 Live.
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 ±«Óãtv can engage with the many different overlapping communities that exist in this rapidly changing space.
We are therefore pleased to say that we are going to continue the trial for at least another six months while we share our findings internally and seek more engagement from other ±«Óãtv teams. We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish ±«Óãtv content more widely using , the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse.
So far in the trial we’ve amassed around 60,000 followers across our six trial accounts, and we have had to do very little moderation of replies associated with our content. 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. 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.
We think this is partly due to the culture of Mastodon, and partly because of some of the topics we’ve posted about. 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.
We have been asked by a number of people on Mastodon to include ±«Óãtv News social accounts in the trial. 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. This means we haven't been able to include ±«Óãtv News in the trial yet, but we are working on it. And to be clear, the account represents the R&D team working on news technologies and doesn't represent ±«Óãtv News as a whole. Over the next six months the trial will continue and we will continue to learn.
We will make best efforts to post and engage with our audiences and add more ±«Óãtv accounts to the trial. Internally, we’ll continue to talk to teams about future plans and strategies for a ±«Óãtv presence on Mastodon and other emerging social technologies, and we’ll stay in touch with the community by publishing updates like this, hoping that they are useful and relevant to others using or considering a presence on Mastodon or in the wider Fediverse. The last six months have been invaluable in improving our understanding of what it takes for an organisation like the ±«Óãtv to be a good member of the Fediverse, and opened up new areas for investigation, such as looking at ways of using ActivityPub as an alternative publishing mechanism for ±«Óãtv content, alongside the social uses of Mastodon.
We have been encouraged by the support we’ve had from the wider community and found a lot of interest internally. Our hope is that this work will lead to long-term ±«Óãtv engagement with the wider network of federated online services, and that we will be able to serve the communities here just as we provide public value in other online spaces.