Summary
The Guardian has announced it will stop posting on Elon Musk’s platform, X, citing “often disturbing content” such as far-right conspiracy theories and racism.
The news outlet, with 27 million followers across over 80 accounts, stated that the US presidential election coverage on X reinforced its view that the platform had become “toxic.”
While The Guardian’s official accounts will withdraw, reporters may still use X for newsgathering.
This move follows similar actions by NPR, PBS, and other organizations concerned about the platform’s content standards under Musk’s ownership.
My sincerest wish is that Elon Musk just waits until an X alternative gets big enough, buys it and destroys it in perpetuity. Save the people from their addiction to “likes” and “shares”.
He would be my absolute hero!!
I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either.
Can we get them to join Mastodon?
I think it’s ideal for new services. They can spin up an instance pretty easily through their existing IT department. They have total control and total freedom because they run the platform. Then federate with other instances to have a reach of millions instantly.
The only reason every news organization isn’t doing it is just bad marketing. As far as I know, there’s no marketing budget for mastodon.
i remember bbc had an experimental mastodon instance, but they dont seem to post anything anymore. i hope they’ll give an update on the trial, anything they found out good bad unworthy whatsoever.
Classic first adopter problem.
The thing is I believe that there’s a real argument for a use case for news organizations, governments, and colleges.
If they’re just seeking engagement, then they have to wait for the platform to grow. But this isn’t about that.
Many news organizations already have comment sections on their website, and they want to push out information on breaking news as quickly as possible. They need a platform to do those things. So, a lot of them use Facebook for embedded comments on the page and Xitter to breaking news. The thing is that they could use mastodon for both, and run their own instance, which would give them total control and not be at the mercy of Musk or Zuck.
Colleges use expensive proprietary messaging apps for students, clubs, and teachers that they can monitor and adjust to fit their needs. Mastodon offers that.
Governments sometimes end up in legal hot water due to freedom of information, etc. that comes with corporate social media. Mastodon offers the freedoms and controls necessary to disseminate vital information and to allow or reject posts as required by local laws.
The point is that Mastodon is an effective public facing communication system that also allows internal controls by the host.
The only publicity and marketing budget that the fediverse has is us, so any opportunity to promote it is our job. Government, education, news. These are the vital areas to promote.
This is the way
Bluesky also a nice alternative.
Bluesky is less ideal as ATProto isn’t really feasible to use without relying on their relays. Thankfully there are bridges but the most ideal solution would be for ATProto and AP to be able to federate directly
Not really, it’s still corporate
It’s still decentralized and has marketing far better than Mastodan. With 15 million members and its origin from Dorsey himself, it’s going to win.
Great, where can I find a list of instances?
No idea!
Doesn’t mean you can’t, though!
Say, will you start your own?
As far as I’m aware, you can host your own Bluesky server, but the main servers don’t federate with anybody else so it’s a moot point.
What is the concern? That if Bluesky falls, the instances fall because of the choke-point?
Isn’t this their plan in the long-term? (Article from February):
Bluesky is taking a big leap toward federating. On Thursday, the social network announced that it is opening up early access for users and developers who want to self-host their data. While this isn’t true federation yet, the company plans to open up federation to larger servers with even more users in its next phase. When the dust settles, anyone can (in theory) create their own server with their own rules on Bluesky’s AT Protocol.
You can self host your data but you have to rely on the main Bluesky servers as a relay. It’s still centralized. Using other relays will be too expensive to be feasible
The concern is that without true federation Bluesky is still for all intents and purposes a corporation-controlled social media, just like Twitter, and therefore subject to the exact same enshittification cycle.
I’ll believe they’ll add true federation when it happens. Color me sceptical, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
exactly, it’s just virtue signaling at this point. they have no intention of competing with third parties by legitimizing them through federation - because bluesky is a corporate service and it exists to generate profit for its eventual shareholders. this is the exact thing that let google and facebook kill XMPP. and what google, microsoft, yahoo, and apple - are doing to the email protocol right now.
normies does not really care about corporate or not. the good thing about bluesky are: easy signups compare to mastodon (noobs do not want to join “servers”), better language filter than mastodon (I tried to pick specific language on mastodon setting. But, I still got unused language that I want to see), customized feed (good to find engagement), less ragebait than X and it is open source.
If news organizations, universities, and governments begin adopting Mastodon, then others will follow
Also way better user moderation than X. Blocklists are amazing.
Bluesky is already in the process of going to shit in more ways than one. Until they start federating they are not an acceptable alternative.
How so? I’ve been looking it over, and it doesn’t seem to have any of the enshittification I’ve seen all over Facebook (let alone Xitter, which is made entirely of festering anus now).
They don’t like that it’s not mastodon, therefore it is “going to shit”.
ads, eye-ball algorithm, data sales - looks like you love the trifecta of feces. sure you ain’t a fly?
Well the obvious one is that they refuse to federate. That inevitably means they have plans to commercialize the platform and want to stay in control. But also little things like the fact that you cant view “age restricted” content without an account. Maybe they will stay somewhat nice for a while but in the end its always the same and there will be nothing you can do about it because they have complete control of the platform and the followers.
They just did another VC financing round and are now partially owned by “Blockchain Capital”.
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/113472115447080382
As for the site itself, I don’t think it’s at the enshitification phase yet.
Jesus fucking Christ. This should be the top comment people read.
just like reddit is a nice alternative to digg ammirite?
we’re on lemmy for a reason mate. if digg is the equivalent of x, then reddit is the equivalent of bluesky, and lemmy is the equivalent of mastodon.
one of those three are not like the other, and one will stick around while the others won’t, because capitalism.
Bluesky is like the Fediverse equivalent of bumper bowling. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a place for it, and it’s better than staying on Twitter, but I do hope it ends up being just a stepping stone for people to get comfortable before taking off the guard rails and moving on to actual federated services like Mastodon or Lemmy.
It’s the fediverse equivalent of the Democratic candidate that DNC is trying to shove down our throat. Fine, I need them to win to beat the evil GOP candidate, but if rather have Bernie
Tried bsky today but for the life of me I cannot understand why comments are not threaded better like on lemmy or reddit, why there’s no comments/replies sorting, saving replies/comments, etc.
Do people really just scroll for fucking ever through the replies to a skeet looking for ones that interest them?!
Lol. Good job.
If we can get all of the sports reporters to head over, that might be the final death blow to Twitter.
Better late than never
That took way too long.
Yeah it really shouldn’t take actual fascism to get people off predatory social media but here we are
Even then, most of them are still using it.
Bluesky is the number one downloaded social app right now.
I just checked in Android and it’s surprisingly #8. Friggin threads is #3 which is shocking cause I never hear or see anything about it. X is at #25 just behind mcdonalds lol. I’m not smart enough to know exactly what that means tho because pretty much everyone already has X/Twitter/whatever the fuck it’s called so of course that wouldn’t show up super high on there. I’ve also had multiple phones with it preloaded onto the OS.
Of course instagram and tik tok and Snapchat and Whatsapp are all pretty high up there so maybe it’s pretty solid evidence of that dumpster fire actually burning.
Threads posts show up on Instagram and if you want to view one it redirects you to the Play Store. I feel that’s why it’s so high up.
Tempted to join just to help boost those numbers.
I did. Lol. Never gonna use it :P
On my phone, it’s #1 under most downloaded of ALL apps hahaha
Yes because fuck Elon. His own postings have a multiplicatior and things he does not like have the opposite. What’s the point of using his shitty right wing platform?
You have to engage with them? Dumbass, these people do not play fair. I hate how legacy media foolishly embraced these idiots playing fair and now guess what.
I miss Tom. He was just your friend and never pushed anything on you.
a lot of legacy media is owned by them more or less so why would it not
If athletes leave Twitter then ESPN won’t post their tweets.
Just saying
Very good. Hopefully others will follow.
I just love how we went from naming it “Twitter” to “Elon Musk’s platform, X”.
Xitter. Pronounced just the way you think.
The intermediate step was “X, formerly known as Twitter”
I was kinda hoping it’d always stay like this.
Also a good one.
Elon Musk’s platform, X, formerly known as Twitter.
there’s been a lot of myopic tunnel vision behavior from otherwise well-informed intelligent people over the last many years.
even now, people are shuffling about, carrying on like literally nothing just happened
get yourself informed and prepared. if not for you, then for your people. you have about a month and a half
even now, people are shuffling about, carrying on like literally nothing just happened
get yourself informed and prepared. if not for you, then for your people. you have about a month and a half
I live paycheck to paycheck and have a family to support. What preparation do you think I’m going to do beyond grabbing my ankles and praying?
that’s the question everyone needs to be sitting down and thinking about. there’s no one answer for everyone, but “do nothing” isn’t one i would settle for
I’m glad you’ve got options.
Buy canned goods, look into how to perserve food, look into local support groups, and co-ops for social and food aspects.
Look into VPNs to make sure you have the ability to see what’s going on and not be limited internet wise.
Look into running for your local government, school board, whatever you can to limit the effect these assholes can do.
Joining mutual aid groups, coops, triple-checking that you don’t have any subscriptions you don’t absolutely need and doing your best to just use FOSS (it’s free!) instead for the sake of your own limited paycheck, triple-check that you’re taking advantage of the free programs and resources available to you like libraries and buy-nothing collectives, try growing a bit of your own food in used jars and buckets, encourage your children to also take advantage of the free resources they might not even know are available to them and ways to save even more by simply reusing every last bit they can if they aren’t already? Get to know your neighbors if you have any time left in your day, parents of your kids’ classmates? I don’t know your situation - none of these might be realistic for you - but those are some of the free ways I could think of off the top of my head for preparing.
I get all the Guardian info from their unofficial account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@theguardian
Better watch out, Musk might sue
(/s, just in case it wasn’t obvious enough)
All better! Global democracy is now unfucked, yay!
/s
