If you dont mind, could you share an example of information posted exclusively on twitter which was crucial to you? Just curious;)
Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
That said, RSS seems way simpler.
RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts?
We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy.
That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS.
(The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.)
> People don't know what an rss feed is.
I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially.
The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
(I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)
It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
I was talking about the political will to mandate "forcing them to stop using it".
The UK doesn't actually have the economic and political will to put together a national Mastodon or Bluesky instance and mandate that all public agencies use it for their announcements. I'm sure there are three fact-finding committees about it at the moment though.
The issue being discussed is important notices from Government agencies that affect people's lives immediately, that shouldn't be behind a login wall. Think train service cancellations and such.
Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.
I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management.
If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.
A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.
Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.
Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.
2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.
It’s still the go-to platform for public figures to broadcast unfortunately, so if you want to verify the original comments you need an alternate frontend or an X account.
the currency intervention took place on July 31, during active market hours. It was immediately detected by global trading desks and reported by major news wires like Reuters and Bloomberg as it happened.
When CENTCOM issued the statement regarding the strikes on IRGC targets, the text went live on the official U.S. Central Command Media Portal at the exact same second the automated post hit their X account.
Before anything was posted online, Lightcap sent an official farewell note to the OpenAI team. Once an email is sent to hundreds of tech employees, it was immediately leaked to tech journalists.
It seems, for all three examples, the platform was used merely as a broadcasting service for information that was either already occurring in the public eye or was simultaneously distributed through formal channels.
- needing to look in several places
- looking in one place
Easy to see why Twitter wins, even when information isn't exclusive, which it often is (I would've suggested video involved in news events, which is often impossible to find elsewhere but easily gathered on Twitter).
There are MTA data feeds, in General Transit Feed Specification format, for program use. Those are for systems that update maps.
The MTA dumped Twitter/X in 2023 because Twitter/X wanted to charge them for using their API, and the MTA refused. [1] The MTA also said that Twitter/X had too much downtime.
When the MTA first got into social media, the person who took the job demanded a desk in the rail control center, so she could see all the displays and immediately hear about problems. If someone mentioned a problem on Twitter, she'd reply immediately. That was the right idea. Few organizations have the guts to put the control room on social media.
[1] https://www.mta.info/press-release/statement-mta-acting-chie...
There’s a system that is not replicable unless you have majority of the population on the same social media.
Surely a public post on a CHP website would have gotten the job done better.