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.
> 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.
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.
The BBC isn't hosting anyone else on their instance (nor can I think of a reason they would want to). As I understand it it's just a way for their activity to be visible on the fediverse. That should make their infra costs minimal; they don't have moderation of comments/replies; and federation/defederation wars will only affect the specific other instances which choose to defederate from the BBC. Your third point is valid but that's why this is an experiment.
You may want to read the actual article which explains how replies very much end up on their instance and therefore require moderation. They will 100% host all replies + all media attached to it. That's how federation works.
Yes, defederation is per instance but cuts of all users of that instance from BBC. Here's a fresh example:
> I figured there was less than 100K people even on Mastodon
https://mastodon.fediverse.observer/stats says currently 2 million active monthly users, 9 million registered. That's just for Mastodon, so add another couple of million for the rest of the Fediverse.
- 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.