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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Uggh. I only use twitter to follow critical (life-and-death) emergency broadcasts from our local fire department.

Is there a viable alternative for them to use now that twitter is going to block most of our county’s residents?

Not really. Blue Sky is the most promising replacement I've seen, but it's just another for profit company, so it will follow the same pattern eventually. I think an official government Mastodon or similar would work, but it really needs to be something hosted by a competent IT dept (meaning federal, in the US), with strict and well considered policies (who gets an account on it?) and with massive buy-in at all levels of government. So... no. Not really.

fwiw, Bluesky is fully federated (well, will be, it's in development, but it's well on the way, they just launched the federation sandbox the other day), and identities are portable, so it shouldn't be susceptible to the same dynamics as twitter. Plus, the dev team has stated a number of times that "the company is a potential future adversary" is one of the principles they keep in mind when designing the protocol. Plus, it's a Public Benefit LLC, for however much that's worth. And I really do trust the good intentions of the current devs and leadership (mostly the same people), based on my somewhat extensive interactions with them—I think their hearts are in the right place.

So of course it definitely could go badly fo a variety of reasons—but I think there's good reason to be optimistic that it will go well.

The issue I see is that the Tech Community, that form and influence opinions, is going to be cautious about investing time in another private social media company.

Mastodon has the mind share already as the de facto Twitter replacement.

Bluesky looks suspiciously like it’s dead in the water.

> Mastodon has the mind share already as the de facto Twitter replacement.

It did, until it got infested with far-left refugees who started banning entire instances whose users their have political disagreements with. Between that and the lack of ease of signing up or setting up your own instance, Mastodon is not taking over from Twitter anytime soon, although it has formed its own community that I'm sure will continue to use it. If Mastodon becomes even as popular as Tumblr now, let alone at its peak, I would consider that a surprising success.

As for the "tech community", some hackers did go over to Mastodon. That's great, but they didn't cause IRC or mailing lists to take over the world back in the day, and Mastodon is even more technically dysfunctional than those (making it so easy to completely block instances is a major issue). Call me when VCs start moving en masse to Mastodon.

That’s interesting!

I signed up, and poked around a bit.

But by and large I decided I was done with that public style of social media.

Now I’m pretty much just HN, and some Dark Social; Telegram, iMessage and FB Messenger friends groups.

Don’t @ me about FB Messenger LOL. I know…. But for our local School Comms it’s essential.

On the VC moving to Mastodon bit: I guess that’s a very SV centric perspective?

I live in an obscure part of Australia, and the less VC posts I see the better. If I saw a post from @jason I’d know it was time to leave ;-)

But seriously, for me, I have zero interest in any of those VC posts or commentary. The value is in more local individuals and other interest groups being active. YMMV :-)

nobody's going to be posting on a government-run mastodon like they do on twitter

Twitter had a brilliant brand (which is now tainted). Chirping birds, positive visual. BlueSky shortens to BS and mastodon is an extinct animal. Lemmy, on the other hand, is kinda cool.

But that's reminiscent of lemmings. Which may not actually group-jump off of cliffs to their deaths, but that's the popular image that comes up.

It baffles me that governments ever relied on an unprofitable ad-supported company to provide critical communications, especially where alternatives exist (email, putting notice on a website.)

And if it’s life or death, there’s Emergency Alert System. Goes on TV, radio, and straight to your phone, complete with the Cold War-era alert tone. I hope Twitter merely supplemented that?

cell broadcast for real emergencies

texts through registration on the site of the city hall, if cell braodcast isnt implemented by the phone company

public emergency sirens

radio

actual website of the city hall

local newspaper

social fabric, with residents actually calling each others, for non emergency topics ?

(Hacker news ?)

Twitter has never been a great solution on its own. It could have contributed along with other channels of communication, so you should already have these.

Emails, too. That's how I get snow emergency alerts and bus notifications.

One disadvantage with all these is they're one-way. Twitter had reasonable ways to manage one-to-many conversations that other solutions lack.

If the local authorities have an actual life-and-death emergency broadcast to make to the entire area they serve, I suspect they have a more effective means to do this than Twitter. As a matter of public safety, they need to be able to inform everyone, whether they've subscribed or not, and in a way that does not require users to think to check for a notification, or even to have a special device (like a cellphone to receive push notifications). Those extra mechanisms are great and helpful, but they don't replace a true public emergency notification mechanism.

Where I live, the tornado siren, which is beyond extremely loud and mounted high up on a pole in the highest point in the neighborhood, can be used to broadcast PSAs. It screams "THIS IS ONLY A TEST" at noon on the first Wednesday of every month. And you hear it whether you want to or not.

How about: I'd like to know what's happening during an active shooter event at my son's school. Is there a loudspeaker for that?

This actually happened to me, and guess where all of the official police updates were posted.

> If the local authorities have an actual life-and-death emergency broadcast to make to the entire area they serve, I suspect they have a more effective means to do this than Twitter.

Youre not wrong, but that doesn't mean they make effective use of them. During one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings, the police elected to only post information on Twitter.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/rcmp-twitter-aler...

For them? Either be a part of a wider alerting system, or an app. Actual emergencies - push text messages to the area, FM/AM radio.

The second they should already know about / be a part of. Maybe email them to check?

For the first, it really depends what area you're in. Australia/Victoria for example has a state-wide https://www.emergency.vic.gov.au/respond/ which has its own app with location/severity based alerting. There may be something similar around you.

A mailing list? A WhatsApp broadcast? Sms messages?

I check my local news station's website every day for good local news. It always has a big banner if there's relevant news like a weather warning, big road closure, fire, etc. The website is pure garbage and viewing it with an ad blocker is mandatory, but it at least loads without all the dark patterns like Twitter.

How did you really use it for emergency info if you weren't logged in? You'd find out there was an emergency and manually go check for details?

I'd think most of the power of posting emergencies on Twitter would be notifications?

I’m in Colorado and I used the Twitter here: https://twitter.com/BoulderOEM

My house was in the evacuation zone for most of the recent fires. I just kept this link open on my phone and refreshed it as needed.

Quite often they will tell you when to expect the next update, ie) within an hour

Even if I had a Twitter, I’d say the random notifications would be more frustrating than valueable in an emergency situation. If I’m in a safe enough spot to look for updates online I can pull up the local OEM Twitter.

How is any normal person following this department on Twitter without a Twitter account?

Bookmark their page, or have it in a tab, or do a web search whenever you want to look

RSS. It’s quite good for an application like this where the publisher has the resources to operate a website, and it allows multiple different consumer applications to all view the published text.

They can host their Mastodon instance maybe?

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