These kind of things show how detached politicians are from their actual job. Shouldnβt they be the FIRST to change, given that theyβre the ones whose direct job is to protect our sovereignty?
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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They're still mostly on X, including left wing ones.. so.. there's that.
There's a difference between a public communications platform and internal tooling. X-Twitter is a shithole, but still a place many people can be reached, which, in my opinion, is important enough for politicians to justify its continued usage.
But there's no public communications function to using MS Office over Libre Office. If anything, there's a should-be-confidential communications function to it. Exposing that to foreign actors seems reckless even under the most amicable of relations, and what we have now is definitely not the most amicable.
So using X is an unfortunate concession to the Network Effect and its bearing on political public work, but using MS Office (whatever name it goes by these days, I lost track) is a liability.
(That said: get the fuck off of X, people, so our politicians can too. I'd prefer Mastodon, but even bsky is relatively more acceptable than X or Threads. Just go anywhere, please.)
I see your point, but still, that's no excuse for X, it was never the network of the people, it's used by politicians, reporters and news junkies. Most people never used it. Politicians and reporters are just addicted to it and too lazy to move anywhere else..
Most people never used it.
I doubt that's accurate.
I know a bunch of people that did use it and made a point of quitting it. And that's just my bubble of people willing to quit in the first place, never mind all the people that didn't. Hell, there were entire meme communities centered on twitter content. One historian whose blog I read frequently referenced twitter, until he announced that he was moving away. He also lamented that the pricks bullshitting "historical facts" to justify whatever dickery had fewer historians to call them out, now that most had left the platform.
Of course, "most people" is a difficult assertion to measure, but I'm certain there were plenty enough readers on the platform, and I suspect way too many are still on there. Your take seems extremely reductive.
Twitter always had a fraction of Facebook or Instagram users. It was/is popular with certain niches, more or less popular in certain countries, but not the network to find your family or friends.Β
Politicians and reporters using it should be ashamed of sharing a platform with Nazis and pedophiles.
Twitter is a significantly different medium. Instagram is obviously geared towards pictures and reels rather than microblogs, and Facebook... actually, I concede that I don't know how Facebook works these days.
I do know that I've seen way more people advertise their twitter than their Facebook in my age cohort (20-30). So again, I don't believe that X is quite so devoid of an audience as you suppose. And in that light, I don't think people whose job depends on reaching as many people and demographics as possible should be indiscriminately expected to leave that platform.
However, I do agree they should (also) use a different platform to break up the network effect and facilitate migration for everyone else. Because the audience are the ones I'd shame for choosing to stay. They have no economic or political pressure to. They absolutely should be ashamed of sharing a platform with Nazis and pedophiles.
@luciferofastora @NorskSud
Is it such a radical idea that the EU, Parliament + Commission, should have its own Fedi server to base ALL its public discussions & comms on, with easily locatable layers & sub-layers for departments & offices + for nations, regions & municipalities, & even for citizens & the European public?
X, Fb, Insta etc. should all at best be clones/bots, so they wouldn't lose audience but the audience would know where they come from + exactly how/where to contact s/o.
Not at all, I fully agree with you. My argument isn't, that X is the best option, merely that there is a justification for (still) using it. As I said, they also should offer a better option to help people get away from it.
@luciferofastora
Sure. π Keep the accounts for that reason but make them secondary & obvious mirrors to their official accounts.
That said, I think it's too complete an idea (not just the Fedi server but the entire comprehensive & inter-compatible EU IT ecosystem) & EU logic is typically particulate (too many cooks imo), so I don't see anything like this happening for a long time.
What you're not taking into account is that many politicians are either completely inept at technology, profoundly stupid, or both.
inept [...] stupid, or both.
Strange way to spell corrupt.
This fails Hanlon's.
Or bought by fascists, or maliciously and willingly participate in it.
And if you're one of those people who think that Office is superior to LibreOffice because of its ribbon interface, the TDF thinks you're wrong and that you only tolerate that layout due to a psychological normalization effect forced by Microsoft.
The UX engineer seems to be in charge of PR too. Not that it's completely wrong, just a fucking hilarious thing to be saying.
LibreOffice is missing the forest for the trees with this: yes, the ribbon isn't the greatest paradigm, but the open-source suite looks like it hasn't had any visual update at all since 2003.
Iβm pretty sure a facsimile of the ribbon interface is available in LibreOffice.
There is... It's just really not very good. Last time I checked, it didn't have keyboard shortcuts.
It's just really not very good
So it's a faithful homage to the ribbon mess, then. Yay!
Well, jokes aside, MS had keyboard shortcuts when they launched, and supported legacy menus too. LibreOffice, by contrast, is experimenting with several different menubar replacements, but they're all half-baked and look like they were developed in Office 2003 times.
Rather than a facsimile, I'd just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they're both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It'd be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.
I honestly think this is the trouble with a lot of open source software, unfortunately. People are used to sleek UIs and switching to something dated or just really different looking that is open source can be jarring, even if it may have all the same features as a paid app.
I just took another quick glance at LibreOffice, and the problem is the whole thing is half-baked to the point where the old UI actually is a problem. The dark mode color contrast is almost white on black, and with a white page it makes the menu items hard to read. Fonts are jagged. And the ribbon - which LibreOffice chose to implement at least a year ago now - shows underlined letters on the menu, but they are not accessible using Alt keyboard shortcuts.
looks like it hasn't had any visual update at all since 2003
You've pointed out another great feature -- no change-for-change's-sake bullshit.
Document editing is a solved UX : except for occasional minor changes, there's no need to fuck with the UI. Compare Tesla fucking with cabin controls in the cars and how the planet is going back to having the fucking knobs in the cars instead of in the design meetings.
Update from 3 days ago:
The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today β Friday March 6 β has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback.
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/03/05/cra-guidances/
wow so cool and you know what that all tops? The fucking download has a .pdf ending, so no one has tested that their wanted file format download even works?!
In marketing speak this is called "Eating your own dog food" and is something that the EU definitely should adopt.
Yeah, in Portugal the NP (Portuguese Norm) for documents is ODF, yet all the state uses Micro$lop's Office. Can't wait to have to send them some docs and rubb their noses in it.