The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is the regulator for vaccines and medicine in the European Union (EU), has stopped using the social media platform X. The website is owned by Elon Musk, who is an important ally of the newly elected United States president Donald Trump. The EMA, whose headq...
Well... Bluesky was founded by the same sort of techbro culture that spawned Xitter, but hit hasn't gone full incel fash fanboy like Xitter. So maybe it's more "Out of the fire, into the frying pan, then back into the fire" because I'm pretty sure Bluesky will follow Twitters trajectory.
Twitter truly went to shit when Musk bought them, and I doubt anything quite like that will happen any time soon, especially considering the huge loss in value since the takeover.
Twitter sucked long before musk bought it. A character limit is just not conducive to many modes of discourse, but that didnt stop people from shoehorning everything into the format anyway. The result is a culture of flippancy, where quips are prized over earnest engagement. I had to stop using twitter in like 2012 because it only ever made me angry, even if I limited my follows to people I agreed with. It's all anwers with no questions, unless they're a rhetorical device in service of the answer.
Twitter was the default way for any famous individual to address their fan base, and government agencies around the world to communicate to the public.
Train delays, road closures, states of emergency, it was all done through Twitter. They weren't spiralling anywhere.
My dear sweet child, governments use private companies to communicate to their citizens all the time.
They advertise on TV, they have ads on bus shelters, they give interviews on commercial radio and TV stations. Even systems like emergency broadcast systems use cellular networks and TV and radio stations run by private companies.
Even government websites are seldom hosted on their own servers.
Using a third party website specifically set up to communicate short, sharp, and to the point messaging as one way of getting information out is just sensible.
I dunno, never discount a company hiring a slash-and-burn failson to give the stock a temporary boost so the upper management can take the money and run. Are you really sure Bluesky won't hire some techbro CEO to pump the stock somewhere in the near future?
No, not worse. It's just not decentralized in a meaningful sense, so it suffers from the same enshittification problems that have killed Twitter, Reddit, BoingBoing, Digg, Slashdot...
Fundamentally, it's not any worse, but it's not any better either.
I don't agree that the idiom implies "worse". In trying to escape being burnt in the frying pan, you're getting burnt in the fire. Either way, you're getting burnt.
I think you, and a large number of people on this site, need to accept that the vast majority of people don't give a shit about FOSS, and many actively view it as a bad thing.
Agencies will have to share custom-developed code amongst each other in an effort to prevent duplicative software development contracts under a new bill signed into law by President Joe Biden.
Are you expecting that regular people will understand what foss means without ever seeing it before? The law is literally named the Securing Open Source Act. By law, code that is not classified must be open source.
it suffers from the same enshittification problems that have killed Twitter, Reddit, BoingBoing, Digg, Slashdot
I'll easily agree that these platforms are bad, but saying anything "killed" them is very, VERY generous. Reddit and slashdot are very much still a thing, and they don't look like they're slowing down, despite the supposedly insurmountable issues. Keep in mind that the goal of a "social network" (for lack of a better word) is having an audience. Reddit literally shat on its user base, AND on the people that kept the site usable, and communities are still thriving there.
When it comes to the average person it's more important to be willing to jump to another platform if an alternative comes up than waiting for a perfect one that will likely never appear. Repeating the cycle of joining and leaving I think is better than just staying when it comes to the average person and mainstream platforms.
Bluesky is a step sideways, not forward or back. It kicks the can down the road a few years, but the fundamental concept is doomed. It has been tried, time and time again, and the inevitable result is gross enshittification.
Given how many social media companies have collapsed over the years because they made their service worse, and their user base migrated en masse to other platforms, I don't think it's inevitable at all. Senior execs will be well aware of the consequences of that type of behaviour.
Don't forget, Bluesky is rising out of the ashes of Twitter, which is a spectacular example of what not to do, and something shareholders will be terrified of.
Given how many social media companies have collapsed over the years...
...it doesn't seem that "senior execs" are capable of learning the necessary lessons. Quite the contrary, the "senior execs" and most of the (early) shareholders of all these failed companies seem to be doing quite well for themselves, long after the companies have gone belly up.
Even if they are capable of learning, they don't seem to care.
not even just social platforms, so many businesses have risen from the ashes of similar businesses that chased off their customers, then went on to repeat the failures of their predecessors. humans, particularly in positions of power or authority, don't learn from their own mistakes so why would they ever learn from the mistakes of others.