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Comment by progval | Hacker News Reader

Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.

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It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).

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.

as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.

As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read.

That said, RSS seems way simpler.

I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?

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.

Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.

I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news.

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.

> We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed.

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.

Yes, you can subscribe from whatever instance you want.

(I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)

You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server.

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.

RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.

We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.

A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.

> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website

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.

I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.

I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.

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.

More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...

At least WhatsApp isn't enshittified yet.

What's their account? I think it would be useful to have a fault-isolated Nitter set up just for such important accounts.

I don't think it's even about being in anyones pocket. They want the publicity. And unless they are all forced to stop using it, everyone has to use it.

Partially true. We can make better front ends just for this information. Imagine traindelays.com or whatever. If it's better than Twitter then people will go there, and then we can get a direct feed from the train company, and then they can abandon Twitter.

> And unless they are all forced to stop using it...

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 problem is that if they did put together those instances the general public wouldn't use them. Most of the public don't want to see a politicians tweets. They share them on Twitter because people will have it put in front of them regardless of desire.

No one cares about a politician's tweets.

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.

There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.

Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites:

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.

Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.

> some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates

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.

Access management is already a problem - just maybe they haven’t run into it. What happens when the employee who has the twitter password leaves? (This is France so the only way is probably retirement).

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.

And when it rots, some enterprising employee says: hey, why don't I just make a foobar account and post there? That would work so much better.

X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.

I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.

You have to give your phone number and are then tracked for what you view.

A more practical consideration for most people, though, is that the app is full of shit. I mean really full of shit. You open the app and it just spews a torrent of shit at your eyeballs until you close it, mixed with the occasional nugget of gold.

Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.

Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?

For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.

Ok but can you answer my question about reliability?

I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.

But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know.

Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?

The information may be as reliable, but:

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 the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.

Ok thanks for the explanation.

This app is just garbage. Can't even use it if you are rooted.

It's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?

Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here

Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.

Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide

The funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.

Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.

Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...

Twitter won by pulling the rug!

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.

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