Comment by abawany
2 days ago
I made the mistake of searching it yesterday via a proxy while trying to search for local police news (why do our govts use these mechanisms to publish first) and ran into threads calling for ethnic cleansing of south asians from Texas. Not a great read.
I'd love to see public agencies or anyone making any sort of significant public announcements use any other platform. FTP a text file to a server for all I care, but I'm not risking a search of a platform that openly encourages extremism and discourages moderation.
I think Mastodon or something similar would be really good, without a central moderation.
They could literally just post to a WordPress blog with the ActivityPub plugin, and then people can either just read it on the website, or follow it from a fediverse/mastodon account.
Where else do you suggest they post? Publishing to the socials casts the widest net form them. If they operate their own website and post there, a number approaching zero would see the posts.
Do you expect a new app per municipality to be a solution? Or one app to become a new platform just to interact with gov't agencies that the other platforms already provide? You have the question, but have you spent any time coming up with answers/suggestions?
In Norway most withdrew from X. Norwegian police made a webpage, an rss feed, some push system and an API. So others have made bots that repost on various social media, but the source is no longer in a walled garden.
Multi-publish is a thing that is managed by numerous publishers. Right now, most govt sites ime no longer publish at all on their sites or rss but instead update one of facebook or twitter, depending on their preference. If they can afford to buy 70k usd suvs at taxpayer expense, they should also be able to figure out how to publish on mechanisms without walls, such as rss or their own site.
My locale uses Nixle to send people alerts: https://www.everbridge.com/products/nixle/
A municipal website? A text file on a file server? Not a login-gated social media platform owned by the world's richest edgelord.