2w 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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2w 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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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 doubt most people know what the difference with pop and imap is though. Generally they don't need to know this sort of stuff.
- 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.
  
  Hiring one extra person, for an agency that covers hundreds of millions of people? I'm gonna go out there and say yes, that is reasonable to expect. Sure, uptake is low now, but network effect is responsible for that, now when people are moving from Twitter is the exact time to encourage people to change to something better.
  The European Commission has its head on straight, that they are being a first mover on Mastodon, because putting critical communication infrastructure in the hands of a private company is silly long term.
  I'm not doubting your reasoning as to why this agency hasn't bothered, but it's not convincing that it's reasonable.
  
  According to fedidb, the fediverse has 1.3 million mau.

95 comments