German institutions depart X, a day after Musk's Weidel talk
German institutions depart X, a day after Musk's Weidel talk
More than 60 German and Austrian academic organizations say they will leave the messaging platform X owned by Elon Musk. The German government has also voiced fears that the platform is warping political discourse.
Summary
Over 60 German and Austrian universities and research institutions announced their exit from Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter), citing the platform's promotion of right-wing populist content and its incompatibility with democratic and scientific values.
This follows Germany's Federal Court of Justice and trade unions leaving the platform.
The German government is also debating a withdrawal, expressing concerns over X’s polarizing effect on political discourse.
The departure comes after Musk’s public support for Germany's far-right AfD party and a live talk with its leader Alice Weidel ahead of upcoming elections.
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Leave Twitter and go where?
With this question unanswered, the sentiment is not very powerful.
Worse, if the answer is "go to Bluesky" or some other institution with a trust structure identical to Twitter, the sentiment is totally meaningless.
Here's a wild idea - go to the official website of the institution and click the "news" tab.
It's like people forgot how the World Wide Web works.
Not a push notification.
RSS
Yeah, I thought of that. RSS doesn't actually do push notifications, though. At least, I'm pretty sure. It's based on polling from the subscribers' clients.
I don’t remember all the technobabble but am almost sure Apple push notifications are actually ’pulled’.
Regardless, there are some sweet RSS reader apps which make it seem like push notifications.
This solves spreading the news.
Mobile push notifications really are pushed. It's actually quite a fascinating problem, because phones are suspended to RAM most of the time and network events need to be able to wake a phone from this state.
In Android Land, just one notification system, called Firebase Cloud Messaging, handles almost all of the push notifications. And it's controlled by Google lol. The situation is similar in Apple Land.
Their official server in the fediverse (https://social.bund.de/public/local) with currently 99 active government agencies and institutions.
Aw, nice!
But that was never mentioned in the article. Missed opportunity.
Yep, Germany in general has a pretty active open source community, so there are already a lot of alternatives out there. Unfortunately, most IT people are bad at marketing, which is why hardly anyone knows about these alternatives.
Unfortunately, most IT people are bad at marketing, which is why hardly anyone knows about these alternatives.
Developers may be bad at naming shit, but no one knows about alternatives because FOSS projects don't have marketing money, not because developers are bad at getting the word out.
That's just the federal level, by now every state should also have an instance, e.g. here's the SH one. Offers accounts to state ministries and agencies, municipalities, public and state-owned corporations and charitable/non-profit associations.
Then there's instances from public broadcasters, someone should make a list.
Nice. This is the way.
Leave Twitter and go where? - person commenting on fucking Lemmy of all places
The point is that they didn't give an alternative in the article. AP is obviously what I would recommend.
Mastodon, dude.
Agreed. It was created and developed in Germany.
Bluesky is built on an open, decentralized protocol. There are appications that allow the AT protocol to federate with Mastodon, even. So yeah, move to Bluesky. Its not like Mastodon isn't also a private company.
Literally anyone could build apps on top of the AT protocol to create a parallel Fediverse to the ActivityPub protocol Fediverse. Best case scenario is we fold them in.
As far as I can tell, all real accounts are all hosted on Bluesky's servers. Until that changes, it's centralised, de facto.
I think someone else already posted the information above about hosting your own account on a private server, so I won't double dip there. But yeah, you totally could host your own server with accounts :)
How about just quiting without replacing it with something else? Everyone desperately needs to stop using social media like a crack addict needs to stop doing crack. Shitter, FB, IG, TokTik, etc - it's all utter, utter shit.
Organisations use things like Twitter to broadcast news as push notifications to a large audience of subscribers. This is something that they're going to want to keep doing, and is only one aspect of social media. On its own, I don't see this ability as being damaging. They're basically just using Twitter as a more efficient mailing list. Things only get bad when opaque AIs start ranking shit and publishing to non-subscribers.
ActivityPub does provide a really good way to reproduce this ability. It is a good solution.
Bluesky is just another Twitter, subject to all of the same drawbacks. The only difference between the two of them is four years.
There are plenty of ways for governments to engage in strategic communications without having to rely on social media, especially when said platforms are disentangling the fabric of society before our very eyes. Moreover, government communication (and 99% of other communication processes) does not require the constant and immediate production and consumption of information that social media are purposefully designed for. Pretending like people are addicted to social media because we really want to stay in touch with policy is just silly.
And no, one thing is not equivalent to another thing just because they belong in the same category of things. Editorial and privacy policies, ownership structures, the extent to which a company or its owners are politically exposed - these are all things that can differ drastically from one actor to another.
So what happens to Bluesky when it is bought by some fucking billionaire?
It is not meaningless to deny X/Twitter content and legitimacy. It may not be the solution you want but it ultimately hurts X/Twitter which hurts Elon. That’s all that matters to most people.
Couldn't the same thing happen to Bluesky, though?
Absolutely but we are fucking over Elon right now… and that is all that matters at the moment.
It doesn’t have a trust structure identical to Twitter though.
Can I start my own bluesky server and communicate with theirs?
Yep
So to be clear, I don't need to make an account on bluesky's servers at all in order to participate in their network?
Yeah you can set up your own PDS pretty easily I think.
For hosting your own entire bluesky it’s more difficult but no technical blocker afaik just poor documentation and tooling because they’re focusing on refining the protocol and improving scaling first.
Neat, I guess, but for as long as it's Bluesky servers handling all of the actual real accounts, it's no different from Twitter.
Meanwhile, AP already has hundreds of independent servers each with their own accounts.
I mean that is just objectively wrong. There are clear differences between it and Twitter.
Mastodon is dogshit and will never gain popularity until they fix it to be more like bsky so it’s irrelevant.