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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Um, good? Facebook and Twitter should never have been allowed to become the default for this, anyway.

These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.

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C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.

I don't think there's any country where most people use Twitter at all, much less use it often enough that they would incidentally see an emergency alert from their local government.

That's an argument against using it as the sole means of communication, which no one has proposed.

Twitter is big in Japan. Same for Facebook in some countries.

The point is that in an alternate reality, in the absence of terrible experiences like Twitter and Reddit controlling what we see with algorithms, RSS tools we have greater personal control of are what we could be/should be using instead.

Assuming you trust whoever is providing the feed to not filter it, and to maintain it forever.

C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc. and even I never use Twitter (er, "X") at all, and never have.

Who actually uses Twitter? No one I know.

I receive warnings by SMS. It seems to work fine if there is some storm danger.

During covid Taiwan IIRC from an interview with Audrey Tang also used SMS with great results.

They almost always do have a website and self hosted stuff. That no one uses. So the government and companies also try to reach out to platforms where they people are. Which was once TV and radio. Is now social media.

> Is now social media.

So presumably that means more services than just Twitter? Because (at least in the US) most people don't use Twitter. That's not a recent thing, that's always been the case.

It's difficult for most transit agencies to maintain the sort of uptime that a social media company does.

But there should be no login wall on posts from government agencies (grey check).

A third party service who's contracted to do it would be the right move in that case. Operating critical processes through a company with no obligation to provide that service is dumb. The evidence is in the outcome here.

We trust the metro companies to run critical infrastructure for our cities, I am sure they can organise a website.

How about paying for Twitter Blue, in exchange for: (1) No login wall on content from transit agency

(2) Uptime SLA

This will be a lot more than $8/month of course, but likely less than contracting it out to the usual suspects of shady vendors.

Aren't RSS feeds a pull mechanism for end users? With social media, it ends up acting like a push to the user so that they get notifications in "near-realtime", which would be important for events like flash floods.

There are a number of services that will do push notifications for RSS feed changes. Agencies could use one of them.

RSS is a great, albeit forgotten, technology. The problem is the social media-obsessed NPCs of the world don't know how to use it. It didn't help that all the major browser vendors removed the technology and you need a standalone client these days.

>NPCs

Let's not. Everybody has different amounts of time to spend on forming their opinion about a given topic. If there's a topic you care about, and someone hasn't yet thought about it as much as you, in no way does that imply they're an unthinking automaton and it certainly gives you no grounds to call them one.

Nah that's matrix thinking. There are wolves and sheep, so you better be a lion.

Lighten up, Francis.

> RSS is a great, albeit forgotten, technology.

It's not that forgotten. RSS feeds are my "front page to the internet", where I get my news, etc. Even HN.

Most sites (at least in the set of the ones I care about) have RSS feeds.

Exactly. Or if for some reason they need the social bit Mastodon is an option. Additionally it has RSS output feeds for everything.

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