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Comment by pera | Hacker News Reader

Government agencies should use RSS or ActivityPub for all their communications, it's unacceptable that they depend on a private company like Twitter for this sort of things.

How did we get to this point?

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I would imagine that the choice of platform is tied to how many people have access to it - twitter is common, so is facebook, and twitter used to be open enough that one could see tweets even if not registered.

The real issue is not rapidly reacting to changes to the platform, such as immediately moving to a different platform, whatever it may be.

I think the problem isn't so much that the infra is privately owned, but that it is privately owned and almost completely unregulated. Emergency vehicles frequently drive across toll bridges in many countries, say, and this is basically fine. What does _not_ generally happen is that they're stopped and told "sorry, the weird new owner of the bridge fired all the maintenance people, so we only have one lane open, and we have to prioritise someone called Cat Turd 2 driving across it, so go away". (The next day, the bridge collapses).

(Arguably something like this did kind of happen with the UK's rail system, with the end result that Railtrack (the private company which John Major had rather unwisely sold the network to and then failed to regulate properly) was effectively re-nationalised.)

Generally speaking, by trying to communicate with people in ways that they will read.

They send the info where the people are. People aren’t using RSS or ActivityPub at the same scale as Twitter.

People use RSS for their podcasts, and they would use it for important government communications too if that was the official channel.

Do both obviously

> How did we get to this point?

Consider how quick, easy, obvious-sounding, low-skill, and low-budget it was for $Govt_Department to sign up for a Twitter account, and just start tweeting.

(Similar for Facebook, or whatever)

Compare that with the "better" alternatives using RSS or whatever. And recall how resistant government organizations are to accomplishing anything that requires "not our usual" skills, planning, approvals, funding, etc.

We got to this point ... because people are cynical and negative about government provided public services ... and there's whole political parties who demand they be either dismantled or that if they have to exist they be outsourced and run by people who are either incompetent or have some patronage/political/business connection.

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