Comment by culi
1 day ago
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.
They could create their own bluesky account or fediverse server
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.
I think the only thing I’d add is some kind of open and standard syndication system like RSS
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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.
Organizations very much rely on websites for the information they share. I don't even know how most data would need to be sliced to fit into tweets.
Like, how would you tweet exchange rates consistently and accessibly?
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/eu...
Microblogging, as a format, is a niche. If you do use it as an organization, you need an authoritative place on the Internet that you control, from which all other data ideally is derived. You can still mirror it to Twitter/Mastodon or whatever just fine.
Deciding to be held hostage by a third-party platform so that someone in the organization can save three clicks is just unprofessional.
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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.