no paywall
They could spin up a Mastodon instance, but given how lousy their UK editorial department is with TERFs, it would be justifiably blocked for transphobia.
I really enjoy quite a bit of the Guardians coverage. Their staff editorial department is often infuriating to the point I often wonder if they actually work for a different news agency.
Their US and Australian divisions are solid. The UK one varies, and has some decent people, but also has a persistent infestation of TERF/SWERFs. A few high-profile ones have left after their comments became irreconcilable with the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line, but you still get regular Observer opinion columns about pronoun-mongers sexualising our children or other scare campaigns. There’s a rumour that the editor, Kath Viner, is herself a TERF and personally protecting them, though I haven’t seen any evidence one way or the other.
the paper’s ostensibly liberal/progressive line
They’re aligned with the Liberal party, which is a centrist party which is seldom if ever progressive. The Guardian does put up some articles by progressives, on occasion, but they also publish articles by conservatives. When the Labour Party was led by Corbyn, the Guardian was consistently critical of Labour policy and bought into the rightwing press’s phony accusations that Corbyn was antisemitic. Overall, the Guardian’s core politics are those of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, as can also be seen by their lifestyle and media commentary, as well as their general smugness. And on economic matters, their coverage is utterly useless. On that, the Economist and the FT are far superior, despite their occasionally odious politics in their editorial pages.
I still read the Graun, though, since the rest of the British press is far, far worse.
I really wish running your own mastodon was as accepted as running your own email server. There’ll be no “blue check mark” problem if your company runs the server and only provides accounts to employees.
They don’t need to do any of that. Just make an account on any instance and go forth.
If you can leave X, you can change instances if needed in the future, too.
Tbh that would put a lot of strain on someone else’s server. It’s not like they’re a small business that can’t afford a dedicated server, and each journalist could have a dedicated handle
BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.
