CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
“
Henderson Row in Edinburgh is closed northbound following a crash involving a van and a cyclist that happened around 11.45am on Monday, 12 January.
Emergency services attended and the cyclist has been taken to hospital.
Road users are advised to avoid the area.
“
Why are the police posting on a site that generates child sexual abuse material?
It baffles me why anyone is still using that site. There's been so many reasons in the last few years to stop.
@neddie, the simple answer is probably that the site is still considered communications infrastructure that reaches a wide audience. The more complex answer depends to what degree Police Scotland has considered the risk of adverse PR and its own comms policies.
I've asked them the question and will find out in 20 days' time.
“the simple answer is probably that the site is still considered communications infrastructure that reaches a wide audience“
Yes
Plus, unfortunately, nothing has replaced it - or offered anything that comes close to Twit in terms of functionality and ‘connectedness’
Platforms do fade or die (MySpace, FriendsReunited etc)
I suppose there’s perpetual optimism that Musk will sell and it can be ‘rescued’. But that seems unlikely.
“will find out in 20 days' time” - that’ll be interesting!!! Well done.
From what I can tell, a lot of X is now bots, and only the extreme-right accounts get amplified. So engagement with regular people isn’t as high as people think it is.
Plus, unfortunately, nothing has replaced it - or offered anything that comes close to Twit in terms of functionality and ‘connectedness’
For two very specific sub-communities that I belong to, I heartily disagree with this.
Both Mastodon and Bluesky match the platform exactly, and also go above and beyond it, for features - if you don't count a CSAM-generating predictive text friendbot as a core feature.
For web development - which moved almost entirely to Mastodon early in Elon's reign, with every key influencer giving that movement traction - there is now very little on X and the exact same 'vibe' and community space there was now on Mastodon, but just on a different platform.
This is also my experience of the very specific 'people who post about cycling in Edinburgh'. Barring the council / edintravel and a handful of politicians, there is only a small handful continuing to post to X over and above Bluesky. For edi.bike and others, there is higher engagement with posts on Bluesky now than there ever was via Twitter/X.
Follower numbers are a big part of this - companies, orgs and political bodies mistakenly see X/Twitter as bigger when in fact for actual engaged users still on the platform - not just with an inactive account after they stop using it over common decency issues and problems with its governance - those users have gone elsewhere or given up on microblog-style social media altogether.
If you are still contributing to X, you are the energy-dense fuel that Musk is pouring into his hate machine. This is true no matter how complex your post-hoc rationalisations are.If you have a large following, and decent influence, you should stop posting on X, make your account private and begin growing your community from the ground up on whatever alternative you prefer. If you do leave, your new digs will feel empty, and it’ll take time to find your friends. You will be tempted to go back: it will take months to adjust to the lack of loud background noise.
https://ketanjoshi.co/2024/04/19/you-are-the-fuel-that-energises-elon-musks-hate-machine/
Agree with bakky.
There are also many prominent climate, energy, rail, urbanism, place-making, and active-travel accounts on Bluesky. In those domains, it's better than X/Twits ever was.
And NO ADVERTS!
If anyone is joining Bluesky, there is a list of Edinburgh active-travel accounts to follow here, to get you started ("starter pack")
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/blackfordsaferoutes.co.uk/3ldhf4swkja2h
“For two very specific sub-communities that I belong to, I heartily disagree with this.“
Yes/no
Bluesky has/can replace T/X for local/niche (that’s not me being rude)
Many people/orgs have left X - I no longer post there as CCE or various other accounts - but many info/news sources (individuals and orgs) are still on X, many with ‘reluctant pragmatism’.
I'm hoping the lack of follow up info / news on this incident means it's truly "only" minor injuries and the victim will make a full recovery. Can't see any news anywhere. Best wishes to him/her anyway!
“will find out in 20 days' time” - that’ll be interesting!!!
Possibly for small values of 'interesting'!
To ask Police Scotland:1) Why it continues to use Twitter/X. Please cite relevant policies, public relations considerations, readership statistics, etc., to qualify the business case.
Police Scotland has not changed our social media estate or strategy and we continue to use the same channels we always have. We continue to use Twitter/ X to help communicate with different audiences and no decision has been made not to use it.
2) Which alternatives to Twitter/X it has considered. Alternatives could include, for example, federated social media such as Bluesky and Mastodon instances.
We have no proposals for other channels to use. An additional channel added to our estate is Neighbourhood Alert for which Policing for our Communities led the implementation.
3) Whether or not it plans to use such alternatives, either as well as or instead of – and if not, why not.
We have not looked into alternatives and have no plans to do so.
So there you go. It's just comms infrastructure and who cares who actually runs it or owns it or what the public thinks of PS continuing to use it.
There is a Police Scotland Bluesky account (@policescotland.bsky.social) but there are zero posts on it. The same goes for Lothian Buses.
Edinburgh Council has a Bluesky account (@edinburghcouncil.bsky.social) which appears to be a mirror of its X account. However, other council functions such as edinhelp and edintravel appear to exist solely on X.
LNER has a Bluesky account (@lner.co.uk) but it seems to be mostly mirroring just the marketing puff on its X account. Its X account seems to get the useful information - disruption, engineering works and the like. Its Bluesky account does say "Our live responses via Bluesky are limited, please contact us on another social media channel if you require support." Which isn't very helpful.
Traffic Scotland doesn't seem to have a Bluesky account.
That's just a small sample of "organisations which provide useful information and/or assistance".
I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that many organisations use consolidated social media dashboard tools to manage and co-ordinate their postings and associated communications (direct messaging and such like) across the current confusing melee of social media services*. If Bluesky requires yet another plug-in or equivalent in order to be integrated into their dashboard, many may simply not bother when it's probably already a non-trivial job keeping abreast of their existing interfaces to all the other purveyors of ragebait, and AI and HI** dross.
When a new entrant into the market comes along they very likely take a look at how many users they are acquiring and prioritise on that basis. For example, TikTok is reported as having ~1.6 billion active*** users, compared to Bluesky which, according to Wiki, has 1.5 million and falling (X is reported to have 561 million active users). It may also not help that Bluesky is regarded as having a predominantly lefty/liberal user base.
* Don't get me started on companies which choose to use Instagram as their primary or even sole communications channel.
** i.e. Human Intelligence. If such a thing can truly be said to exist on social media. He said, posting on an online forum.
*** For a given value of "active" - which I'm sure must be defined somewhere, otherwise the stats would be essentially meaningless...
So not just facists left on X?
You must log in to post.
Cycling in Edinburgh Flickr group
Video embedded using Easy Video Embed plugin
posts