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.
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.
This is the way
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.
Bluesky also a nice alternative.
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):
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 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
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.
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?!
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