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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/itaru2622/bluesky-selfhost-env
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.
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.