I’ve never used it, but W is a firehose service like BlueSky or Twitter, hosted in the EU. It uses the at-protocol for federation (incompatible with ActivityPub) so it works with other firehose services like BlueSky.
The Fediverse
I get the people here saying “just don’t have any of them”. Recently I decided to wipe my IG account’s likes that I left on all posts. You know - so the algorithm knows less about me. Mind you, this was several thousand likes to remove.
There is no bulk unliking option, so I did this by hand. Select the same -teen photos, unlike, wait for the reload, repeat. The benefit is that you get a look atwhat you liked, since you’re combing through it by hand.
What struck me is 99% of those posts were from people I haven’t ever met. They were rando short creators. There is nothing “social” about this medium anymore. It’s a media medium.
Social media lives from its userbase. The article continues to mention one or more apps per country. This divides the userbase and makes the apps pointless. Meanwhile european politicians continue to post on X.
Reminds me of the ole joke when 3 left wingers meet they form 4 new splinter parties.
There is nothing ‘pointless’ about decentralization.
There is a difference between decentralisation and not talking to each other.
The Fediverse is dezentralisation. Multiple platforms hosted on myriads of servers that all can talk to each other and each platform’s and server’s userbase accumulates.
When a third of Twitter’s users switch to Bluesky, another third to Eurosky and the last third to W Social, it means users on either platform now only can talk to a third of the people they could reach before.I get that as well. There are advantages to not having the entire world be a part of your group. It’s not pointless.
But you don’t need to have everyone on separated plattforms to not have the entire world be part of your group.
Meanwhile european politicians continue to post on X.
The same politicians also like to constantly appease US fascists while trying to normalise genocides in the Middle East and copying moves from the exact same playbook of ‘how to destroy democracy with right-wing populism and culture war’.
So maybe, just maybe, it’s not the lack of alternatives (or even the need to have one) but their intentions that make them flock to and stay on that platform.
You’re better off not having any of that shit
Critical thinking and reading comprehension?
Ahhh who am I kidding, we’re all no-attention-span-ass-having fucking morons these days lol
Good old socializing
There is literally zero meaningful benefit of having those apps whatsoever. You’d better ask why EU does not invest billions in physics , mathematics , biology etc and in universities
The platforms are cheap. Let all politicians, influencers, athletes and musicians announce that they are going to switch next week to mastodon. Announce it in the news. That’s it. Most people will follow.
That leaves the billions for science, where they belong.
Why would we need European alternatives to bot-infested, troll-operated platforms for far-right propaganda and destroying civilised public discourse?
We need an european alternative, not an european clone
But for now, there is no sign that Europe’s alternatives will outperform their American or Chinese competitors.
So, stay at X and Facebook.
They must know that they had the opportunity to drive traffic to mastodon or lemmy. They also ignored bluesky entirely to make that argument.
In other words,
Germanythe German government doesn’t want to build up an alternative.“Germany” is not a monolith, Mastodon is primarily being developed in Germany and the German user numbers are actually competitive with X and Bluesky.
Fixed that.
I meant that the government could push European social networks much more with its tools.
DW, is a German state-funded television network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle
This is not a regular public broadcaster but directly in control of the government.
Nope, they are not. It’s a little bit complicated: They are getting funded directly by the government, but are not controlled by them directly.
Sooooo PBS?
PBwhat?
Germanythe German government doesn’t want to build up an alternativeStill wrong. German politicians and parties have in big parts fled those far-right cesspools. It’s just the right-wing populists that stay there because that’s where they have an audience cheering for their insanity.
So no, it’s not some unwillingness to build an alternative. They are straight out appeasing fascists and staying on that platform because they want to copy their ideas on how to keep in power by dividing the population with a permanent stream of bullshit.
There is only exactly one right-wing playbook and everyone is copying from it.
German politicians and parties have in big parts fled those far-right cesspools.
I have heard about SPD, GRÜNE LINKE leaving X, but no headline said where they were going. That was a huge lost opportunity.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/spd-gruene-linke-rueckzug-x-100.html
They moved to Bluesky which is to X like Democrats to Republicans.
Is the movement bigger?
Most importantly, the CDU stayed, which makes “right-wing populists” a jab.
the CDU stayed, which makes “right-wing populists” a jab.
Do you really want to pretend that the C*U is doing anything else nowadays but populism? They are basically parroting every culture war bullshit the AfD brings up with some delay.
They campaigned on “hard work needs to pay off again” before screwing workers, “no new depts, the country doesn’t have a problem of revenue but on of expenses” before taking on a historic amount of dept, just to waste it all on tax cuts and subsidies for the ultra-rich and actually create a revenue problem, while also loudly announcing to reverse all policies of their predecessors (which usually meant just renaming them without much change - normally just removing all measures making them socially acceptable).
All while rotating so quickly through different groups to blame that the only people they did not insult by now are toddlers and their rich patrons.
They are the posterchilds of promising everything their voters produce in empty bar talk, yet not delivering anything but platitudes and finger-pointing.
You are right. First time reading I didn’t put enough weight on populist.
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