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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

What open medium would you suggest as an alternative to X?

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.

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Everything should be on their website, plus posted to the top social media (by popularity) to make it easier for people who want a push feed.

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.

They could create their own bluesky account or fediverse server

It's called "The Web" and every government org pretty much already has a website. All they have to do is publish something on it.

I think the only thing I’d add is some kind of open and standard syndication system like RSS

You then have to figure out where the RSS button is for every website.. it's a nightmare for the average person

Browsers used to have a little RSS button either next to the address bar, or somewhere in the bottom status bar. But a propaganda corporation has been leading the charge in browser "development" for past few decades, and those do not like it when people exchange information without a centralized middleman, so use of RSS got deliberately pushed as far away from mainstream use as possible.

So of course now it's "a nightmare for the average person".

Its still not actually a nightmare because for pretty much every RSS reader you can just past the website URL into the subscribe function and it'll present you with all the feeds provided by that site sourced from <link rel="alternative"> tags. The browser feature was good for reminding people about the existence of RSS feeds but it is not required to solve the purported problem of feeds being hard to find.

Could it be intuitive on mobile? The problem is, how do we make it as simple as scrolling and tapping on the follow button so the user never even has to change apps?

I agree, but apparently that's still too difficult for the mainstream user.

It is. Like why do they have to take several steps and remember instead of being reminded

Bluesky and the fediverse. No one outside the US and Europe uses websites for anything that isn't buying or selling something because social media gets more views even for political purposes.

Organizations very much rely on websites for the information they share. I don't even know how most data would need to be sliced to fit into tweets.

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.

Oh you mean statistical data, I see they often post progress on some public infrastructure work, you post 100 words at a time and split it across posts

>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

HTTP over TPC/IP.

RSS

I mean, I think a small website/blog with an RSS feed would be fine. If they really want it in social media format they could host an at proto PDS.

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