Comment by Toxygene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Toxygene | Hacker News Reader

While at a conference last year, I got COVID. My hotel refused to extend my stay, and wanted me to take an ambulance ride to another "COVID quarantine" hotel. I had a bad fever, was far away from my home and family, and didn't know what to do.

I had deleted all my social media accounts years ago, but on a whim, I created a new Twitter account and posted @ the hotel and the conference organizers, asking for help. Within 30 minutes, my hotel stay was extended and I was able to fly home five days later.

I wanted to share this story because I wanted to bring some positive perspective to the discussion about these platforms. I don't know if a government-built social media platform is a good idea, but I think there's merit to a discussion of a "public utility".

> I think there's merit to a discussion of a "public utility".

I have thought about this a lot. Twitter brands itself as the "public square" and I've tried to figure out how that works in practice. In the United States we have public parks, why can't we have public web spaces?

There was a post in another thread about the idea of what a "public web" would look like, and I am trying to understand how it would work in practice.

There is _somewhat_ of an existing framework for this in the form of public media IMO such as the BBC and NPR - I have been debating if such institutions could start hosting Fediverse flavors to continue public discussion on topics. The infrastructure could be provided as a contract that would be bid on by tech companies on their cloud services; while the administration would be left to various semi-public institutions: PBS, NPR, BBC, your local state university, etc.

Basically, just encouraging public funded Fediverse instances, but infastructure provided by the contract awarded bids. Data on these public instances could be considered public domain; and companies wanting AI training sets could leverage these if the proper policies existed on how to utilize these data sets with public sanctions.

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