With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.
My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.
Public institutions especially.
There's zero excuse, none.
How about the general lack of awareness of "open platforms", or of any given one of your objections to X?
Most people are not in the HN bubble.
I promise you, most public institutions are capable of hosting a web site or running a bluesky account
> Public institutions especially.
> There's zero excuse, none.
Maybe it wasn't their intent, but they clearly wrote it as a more general statement, with an additional and specific intolerance to public institutions, which is also how others interpreted it.
And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.
Is it? I haven't seen a Pinterest link in a while so I guess it depends on what bubble you're in.
It's no secret, meanwhile, that twitter has seen steady declines both in daily active users as well as plummeting engagement levels from those that haven't left yet.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/pins-gains...
What's an example?
It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type. To the user, each individual site is as convenient as a conventional social media site such as x/twitter. It aims to combine the advantages of decentralization such as independence, with the advantages of centralization such as a large amount of content
One roadblock is marketing, because the first thing the fediverse sites like mastodon or Lemmy try to do when you search for them on Google is get you into a server. That sounds too technical and is not how the average person uses social media at all. Bluesky fixes this and has an entirely new idea for how the fediverse works.
One downside to the concept of servers is that besides feeling fragmented to the average user compared to bluesky or Instagram, most tend to cater to a specific audience so they filter content for you. It's not like bluesky or Instagram where the user does it entirely from scratch by following accounts (which Instagram ignores anyways)
That's how it should work but its not how it works in practice because some admin can't stand the idea of opinions contrary to their own existing on the same network. So they deferedate from instances they don't like as well as those instances that don't do the same.
..meanwhile, X is owned by such a person.
But to be fair, that's the same with a newspaper subscription.
Seems pretty obvious, not every citizen has access to twitter, there's no legitimate chain of trust and there's endless potential for corruption and manipulation.
In pretty much every developed country sans the US apparently governments, even local ones, tend to be obligated to publish information through their own channels because 1. they own them so you know communication is authentic, 2. they can't ban or restrict you from accessing it, they know how that information is made available, there's no financial conflict of interest.
It's completely possible for Twitter, given that the government has no insight into its technical operations, exert influence on who sees what and how. That alone is insane for public, government communication. If the government isn't sovereign in respect to its communications infrastructure your government is run by tech oligarchs
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.
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.
So of course now it's "a nightmare for the average person".
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.
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.
>If you do use it as an organization, you need an authoritative place on the Internet that you control
This is a very American/european, technical way of thinking. The average person in those countries will ignore it at best, and see it as unnecessary at worst. It's a losing proposition because, no one reads the website. The goal is not to archive stuff but to win the next electoral campaign. So, like a company, they focus all their efforts in that direction.
The reason it's American/European is because other places got internet access only after social media was established so around 2012, so your idea for them is... A social media page. And a social media page costs zero dollars to host and can be managed by someone non technical. A dedicated web page is very often the exact opposite and thus undesirable due to cost
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.
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.
If I have a link to a local emergency department twitter handle, I can view all of their recent posts, right?
(but I'm as fiercely independent as my own skills and ability to learn can manage)
For example you can view the main post and included links in incognito not logged in, just not the "discussion"
https://x.com/ManCityCouncil/status/2091903421917892994?s=20
Showing everything is not viable under those competing goals. So they have settled on:
Show the post when someone has a direct link, but require login to see the discussion Show a limited number of recent posts on a profile, and require login for more
Raising that limit from 6 to 10 would not solve the real complaint: “I cannot see communication from my city.”
They already identify government official accounts. One simple option is to extend the visible timeline for those accounts only—six months or a year of posts—while still keeping discussions behind a login.