Comment by dolebirchwood
1 day ago
I'm totally clueless, but aren't there rules requiring accessibility of public-facing government communications, to the extent that they shouldn't be allowed to use a gated platform when making official statements that are a matter of public interest?
It should be that way.
My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.
Public institutions especially.
There's zero excuse, none.
People don't seem to know about bluesky, the fediverse and the indie web enough.
Public institutions shouldn't be posting on bsky.app or mastodon.social either. The primary source of public communications should be fully hosted on public infrastructure and only then syndicated and/or federated elsewhere.
2 replies →
Some people avoid those because they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial. That's why X hasn't disappeared like some of the HN crowd predicted.
13 replies →
[dead]
> There's zero excuse, none.
How about the general lack of awareness of "open platforms", or of any given one of your objections to X?
Most people are not in the HN bubble.
An open platform could be as simple as hosting their own website. You don’t need to be in a “bubble” to know about websites.
15 replies →
If it's not the case currently, it should be, that public institutions MUST make their public statements widely available. The old POSSE way seems correct. Blocked, or EULA'd or Paywalled on third-party platforms doesn't do that.
1 reply →
Someone could certainly make a case in a lawsuit for an ADA violation. I bet if people organized, the city would listen before it got to that point
There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication
There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment violations like blocking users or deleting comments.
Ya'll are talking lawsuits and organizing protests, but the reality is probably just that no one (outside the Bluesky/HN bubble, which is tiny) cares. Very few probably care what their local government is babbling about today in general, and even fewer what platforms they're using.
And yet if someone did care, there's a decent chance if they asked the right person in the right way they'd be like "Oh, Mastodon? Okay, sounds neat, oh you know what it's just another checkbox in the software we use to cross-post everything! I'll just check the box!"
But nah, lets not do the easy thing, lets look up legal precedent and ponder the ADA.
My experience with this type of stuff is that there's always way more people that care than people realize. But the barrier is that ONE person needs to care so much as to start organizing. Once you set up the organization, people do join and contribute. The hardest part is that first step
"Very few probably care what their local government is babbling about today in general, and even fewer what platforms they're using."
Since schools in my area started yesterday, I'll add that parents do rely on communications regarding weather, early dismissals, transportation, day care, after school activities, etc.
What open medium would you suggest as an alternative to X?
I miss the days when we had an RFC, people got together, came up with a solution, and we ended up with decentralized NNTP or something. Everything is someone's little kingdom now.
Everything should be on their website, plus posted to the top social media (by popularity) to make it easier for people who want a push feed.
They should also post to at least one social media site that allows full reading for free without an account and supports notifications (possibly only with an account along as that is free), unless one of the top sites they post to satisfies this.
The reason for this last is so that if there is demand on some less popular medium for these posts, someone interested could build something to subscribe to the feed on the free site and repost it unofficially to the other service.
1 reply →
It's called "The Web" and every government org pretty much already has a website. All they have to do is publish something on it.
7 replies →
Bluesky and the fediverse. No one outside the US and Europe uses websites for anything that isn't buying or selling something because social media gets more views even for political purposes.
2 replies →
HTTP over TPC/IP.
RSS
I mean, I think a small website/blog with an RSS feed would be fine. If they really want it in social media format they could host an at proto PDS.
I presume the post is referencing principal councils in England or Wales. They're powerful enough to make life difficult, but small enough to not get a lot of oversight. From what I've heard, it's like a government-backed HOA, and they're notorious for doing whatever they want, while not letting you do what you want.
Newspapers are still often required to be used for certain government publications and they cost money. TwitterX is free. I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.
It is not free? You just pay them with your private information and by looking at a few ads. That is not free. Unless you believe information and time have no value?
Newspapers aren't free either. But Twitter, I mean that crappy one-letter site purchased by a chud, is still garbage. I'm definitely not defending it.
You need to make an account to access it. That's not free
I have an account and I paid zero for it. Are we talking about the same thing?
4 replies →
Worse, you can be banned for reasons unrelated to your local laws and lose access.
>I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.
Seems pretty obvious, not every citizen has access to twitter, there's no legitimate chain of trust and there's endless potential for corruption and manipulation.
In pretty much every developed country sans the US apparently governments, even local ones, tend to be obligated to publish information through their own channels because 1. they own them so you know communication is authentic, 2. they can't ban or restrict you from accessing it, they know how that information is made available, there's no financial conflict of interest.
It's completely possible for Twitter, given that the government has no insight into its technical operations, exert influence on who sees what and how. That alone is insane for public, government communication. If the government isn't sovereign in respect to its communications infrastructure your government is run by tech oligarchs
Exactly. It‘s isn‘t just possible, we know it‘s happening.
No, and this policy goes back to publication in for-profit newspapers. Not an issue in the USA in general.
With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.
It's not gated. You can read any non-adult post with a direct link. I'm seeing this perspective all over in here. As someone without an X account, I can only assume you all have X accounts to not know this!
You can't see replies without an account, and it is pretty common for content to be posted as a series of replies to the first post
You can still view direct links, but you can’t scroll someone’s profile or use the search functionality without an account. How many I supposed to scroll a government organization’s tweets if I can only see the first few?
Ah, and if that person has split their post into several messages, I can definitely read all of them from a direct link to the first message, right?
If I have a link to a local emergency department twitter handle, I can view all of their recent posts, right?