Summary
The Guardian has announced it will stop posting on Elon Musk’s platform, X, citing “often disturbing content” such as far-right conspiracy theories and racism.
The news outlet, with 27 million followers across over 80 accounts, stated that the US presidential election coverage on X reinforced its view that the platform had become “toxic.”
While The Guardian’s official accounts will withdraw, reporters may still use X for newsgathering.
This move follows similar actions by NPR, PBS, and other organizations concerned about the platform’s content standards under Musk’s ownership.
As far as I’m aware, you can host your own Bluesky server, but the main servers don’t federate with anybody else so it’s a moot point.
exactly, it’s just virtue signaling at this point. they have no intention of competing with third parties by legitimizing them through federation - because bluesky is a corporate service and it exists to generate profit for its eventual shareholders. this is the exact thing that let google and facebook kill XMPP. and what google, microsoft, yahoo, and apple - are doing to the email protocol right now.
What is the concern? That if Bluesky falls, the instances fall because of the choke-point?
Isn’t this their plan in the long-term? (Article from February):
The concern is that without true federation Bluesky is still for all intents and purposes a corporation-controlled social media, just like Twitter, and therefore subject to the exact same enshittification cycle.
I’ll believe they’ll add true federation when it happens. Color me sceptical, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.
You can self host your data but you have to rely on the main Bluesky servers as a relay. It’s still centralized. Using other relays will be too expensive to be feasible