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.
Remember when “social media” was our friends posting vacation pictures on their glitter-GIF-dumpster MySpace pages and memes were about funny cats who couldn’t spell, instead of both being weaponized fashy-virus vectors?
And now we’re talking about entire nations banning internet platforms thanks to ultra-rich crybabies using meme-fluence to buy elections.
. . .man. . . :(
Anyway, yeah Germany, we’re over here on our own community-led open-source infrastructure having a great time, jus’sayin.
I’ve heard your people even have the best memes too!
Germany’s feds better not start a tiktok. :(
Good fucking riddance. What took them so long?
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
Their official server in the fediverse (https://social.bund.de/public/local) with currently 99 active government agencies and institutions.
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.
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.
Mastodon, dude.
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 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.
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?
Removed by mod
What the hell took them so fucking long. Anyone still using Xitter is a fascist enabler.
Well ain’t that a sweeping generalization. Almost like it can’t possibly be true…
Yes
Leave it and…
Leave it and…
block that steaming pile of garbage.
It’s critical to make this asshat’s soapbox irrelevant.
That’s a cartoon waiting to happen. Musk jumping up and down on his dilapidated soapbox, in the center of X plaza, surrounded only by his bots. It’s the glorious final stage of the echo chamber.
Please rest of the world - SHUN Musk and to whatever degree you can, also Trump, exactly like this. Their egos can’t handle it, and your efforts to de-legitimize them both may be one of our most effective weapons to limit the damage they do.
When they ask why, tell them “Because you’re friggin weird and we’ve had enough.” Lol
This is the case with so many world leaders. If nobody accepted their money, and everyone just pointed, laughed, rolled their eyes, and moved on whenever they opened their mouths, they’d instantly cease to have power over world events.
If only…
X is pronounced like “icks” in German. Appropriate.
I still call it Xitter (shitter).
Godammit, elon. All you had to do was be cool. Coast on that "visionary’ crap and keep on winning life. But, no. You are just and asshole. Jerk.
Better late than never…
Get out now!
this is just like what mark zuckerberg said about all of europe having “too much censorship” and “making innovation impossible”. but i guess if germany really cared about being unbiased they would have moved all their institutions to texas by now or something.
Where is the innovation? Those companies just buy other companies they don’t innovate they buy
they innovate new ways of performing regulatory capture and new ways of monopolizing industries. rest assured that this is all a good thing somehow
And are we sure these monopolies are located in germany and not say the US?
Where is the censorship here?
uuhhhhhhh…. ummm…… there’s…. uhhhh….
I fear where they are going to go… they probably have a governmental Mastodon instance, but will go to Bluesky or Threads. They will have learned next to nothing from the experience, I bet.
Makes sense, since you know Musk can and will corrupt what you say on his platform.
