6d ago

European Medicines Agency ditches Elon Musk’s X in favor of Bluesky

nltimes.nl European Medicines Agency ditches Elon Musk’s X in favor of Bluesky

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...

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6d ago

European Medicines Agency ditches Elon Musk’s X in favor of Bluesky

nltimes.nl /2025/01/24/european-medicines-agency-ditches-elon-musks-x-favor-bluesky

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95 comments

Man, everyone bitching about Bluesky but very few cheering the long overdue departure from twitter.
Anywhere is better than twitter.
- Ah yes anywhere is better than twitter let me go switch to threads.
  Jumping from one central controlled platform to another changes absolutely nothing. People switching to Blue sky instead of the fediverse are braindead
  
  Threads and twitter are both worse than bsky. I like Mastodon even more but bsky is at least a departure from open right extremist rhetorics.
  I could debate the braindead assertion, but I don't feel like it, and in any case a braindead not-Nazi is a net improvement over a Nazi (which are braindead anyway) or a Neo-Nazi (who do a damn good job at imitating that).
  
  Any changes away from Twitter is a net positive. I don't care where, as long as its not there.
  
  I wouldn't mind if they did switch to threads. It would still be a chink in the stranglehold that Twitter has.
  
  This. Eventually, some billionaire will buy up BlueSky and make it shitty. It's much harder for one person to take over a defederated platform, spread out over hundreds of instances in several countries.
- That's people for you. Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag!

For the love of god wake up people, do you know what little percent of people know about fedi? Services like these jump to where the public is, not drags public behind it. Bluesky made huge jump publicity wise, and that's when it was already more widely known than fedi. Moaning about it doesn't help.
In perfect world, we'd have country-specific instances with all national news and announcments centralised in there, to which people could easily subscribe to. But that even sounds complex to average person, compared to "Hey, Bluesky? Yeah twitter but better".
- I know the BBC has made a Mastodon instance as a test some time ago. If only other broadcasters did something like that.
- End user doesn't really need to know how it works. We talk about it more because most people here are tech nerds
  
  End users didn't know how email or the world wide web worked once upon a time. There's that clip of Katie Couric asking her producer "Can you explain what internet is?"
  In the years since, they figured it out.
  And as I pointed out recently, people figured out how to play WoW even if you have to pick a server before you can start playing. My understanding is different servers have different modes, like there might be one where PvP is enabled, etc. so there's a clear reason expressed why you might pick one over the other. I've noticed Fediverse instances are really shit at that.
  I signed up for Pixelfed recently, and the Join Pixelfed website's page where you pick an instance had a bunch of tiles that read something like this:
  | Pixelfed.de
  |
  | Pixelfed is an image sha...
  Fist of all the description for the instance started out trying to explain what Pixelfed as a whole was, and then it was truncated to about a quarter of a tweet with no way to expand it right there.
  I'll take this opportunity to bang on once again about everyone wanting to make general purpose instances with no attempt at finding a niche. I've been saying this since joining; every instance decides it needs a c/funny or a c/linux or a c/cats or a c/games and so then there ends up being 40 of each and the one on .world or .ml ends up being the de facto one everyone uses. Then you get a page where you have to pick from lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, lemmy.ca each one giving the first fifty characters of the definition of Lemmy as their description, yeah no one's going to open another browser tab and end up doing something else when confronted with that, huh?
- I'm surprised that the norm isn't to do many of them, that someone hasn't written some software package that just "aggregates" multiple platforms on the client side.
  I mean, if I were running a business and wanted to have a social media presence, that's probably what I'd want to have.
- I'd have no problem with them making Bluesky account, but why not both that and spinning up a Mastodon server?
  It's just short-sighted
  
  Well, to keep profile on Bluesky they essentially keept the same social media presence guy and just tell him to switch. To add to it Mastodon, they suddenly need to extend infrastructure to add a server, need to have someone manage that server and on top of that make that social media presence guy also take care of posting there. If they even have that guy and it's not simply something Monica from HR is doing.
  And all that for what, maybe 500k people using it? Accounting for people not hearing about it, not being in EU, not caring about it etc. etc.
  For comparision, Bluesky has 3 times Mastodon's users and it's growing quicker than Mastodon, being seen as viable alternative to twitter/x.

Disappointing.
They could have followed the EC’s example https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/about
- You could send a question to them to ask why: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/about-us/contacts-european-medicines-agency/send-question-european-medicines-agency
- Yes...most of these news recently is then followed up by:we are on bluesky now... Well it's fair enough but they should at least also join mastodon .. I don't know. It's frustrating.
  
  Or just bridge to Mastodon

Lmao they went to Bluesky, a centralized (don’t get pedantic with me) social media platform controlled by Americans. Genius
- Still an improvement
  
  From boiling water into water that happens to be in a switched-on kettle. Huge improvement.
  When the enshittification comes (when, not if, they'll have to drag their feet to move somewhere else again. All their followers will have to follow them again. Had they moved to a proper open solution, they could've stayed there indefinitely.
  It's not just about Bluesky" not being the proper and pure solution", it's about this being a temporary measure at best, and people don't seem to realize that.
- People go to the platform that's easy, attractive and works, instead of the very beautiful, finely crafted, exquisite solution that requires days of reading followed by fiddling every other day to barely get the same immediate result, assorted with hidden surprises like hidden moderation and silent failure situation that leads to fragmentation of the whole network. What a surprise.
  Also, "don't get pedantic with me" does not sit well with the current goals of bluesky. Sure, right now, they focused on making something that works and is usable by everyone. Whoop fucking doo, that's exactly what mastodon/lemmy/most activitypub services skipped. And that's why the general public look at them with contempt. I can't see the future (maybe you can, lucky you), but for now, bluesky works, and the plan they're still following up to now is aimed toward a decentralized solution.
- Wikipedia says "direct messages are offered though a central service". If that's was/still is correct then you're correct, it's centralized.
  Nuance is the friend of truth - pedantic.
  
  The whole algorithm (AppView) is centralised. While it's technically possible to host with enough capital, a second AppView server would also double bandwidth required for every message sent on the network. This gets worse the more AppView instances you add, as every message has to be sent to every AppView server (exponential growth)
- If I had a company with public presence, I would too. Companies and organization's go to the people are.
  
  This is local thing though.

Use mastodon

It's not X, it's Truth Social 2.0.

not enough, we need businesses and other government organisatiins ditching X fast

Why have they jumped to another billionare run site instead of spinning up a mastodon instance?
- Ask them. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/about-us/contacts-european-medicines-agency/send-question-european-medicines-agency
- FYI, Jay Graber is not a biliionaire.
  
  Until they can sell blue sky to VC that is.
- Because there hasn't been much billionaire behind bluesky for a long time now, and "spinning up a mastodon instance" is the exact reason the general people are avoiding mastodon in the first place.
  The goal is to reach people, not to promote a pure solution that's repulsive to the masses.
- It's easier
- You already know why
- Or why isn't there a server for EU agencies rather than each of them spinning one up. Surely across the whole of the EU, somebody could set that up.

Out of the frying pan, into ~~the fire.~~ yet another frying pan.
- Are you implying Bluesky is worse? Because that's what that idiom means.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- In what way?
  
  https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
  https://torment-nexus.mathewingram.com/is-bluesky-decentralized-its-complicated/
  Basically, Bluesky is not functionally decentralized, so it's just another platform destined for either failure or enshittification.

95 comments