| It's good to experiment, but in this case even without experimentation you can draw some important conclusions about the benefits of centralized social media: - You own your account, but not the infra. I'm sure that BBC can manage to run Mastodon by throwing resources at it, but still...not needing to do that at all is appealing. - You don't have any liability regarding the moderation of replies, in fact, there's barely anything to moderate. When a nutjob replies to your tweet, you're not responsible for it. Nor are you responsible for the handling of personal data of people replying. All of this is not your problem, which is nice. - For the time being, centralized social media has superior reach potential, not just because of the bigger audience potential, your account is also vastly easier to discover through search and algorithms. As an example, BBC world news has 40M followers on Twitter, whilst on Mastodon an account having 100K+ followers is exceptionally rare. - Federation/defederation wars may reduce your reach even further. I think the risk for BBC is fairly small as it's typically not that controversial, but inter-instance wars is a big thing on Mastodon. Bottom line is that you're adding operational and legal headaches with very little to show for it in comparison to the big networks. |
Mastodon imho desperately needs proper multi-tenancy, i.e. bring your own domain, separate handles, some settings customization, without needing to run whole another instance of the server. We already found out in the 90s that vhosting is useful for stuff like web and email. This would open the door for people to better offer Mastodon-as-a-service.