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Comment by sureglymop | Hacker News Reader

It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).

Of course that's a real issue since the whole thing is login gated and inaccessible. But unfortunately it is the reality. So I think something like XCancel is needed.

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Public communications from government entities really should be legally required to be disseminated on public forums (ideally properly hosted on .gov domains for easy verification, with RSS feeds) Cross-posting on other platforms should be allowed (with backlink to the .gov), but the .gov should be authoritative.

Unfortunately that requires a level of technical competence that most government entities don't have in the US. Not to mention the ridiculous requirements/processes that are placed on official govt software.

It is 2026, it is not hard to publish a "blog" , if you want to share that same content over social networks that's fine but it should be a requirement that the data doesn't solely live in private walled "social" networks

How is posting on wordpress.com or tumblr.com any different from posting on x.com?

1. It's always publicly readable;

2. It is not reliant on any singular corporation, or trusting any singular corporation.

3. The established domain name system proves authenticity.

And of course the information can still be posted to X, etc.

1 is untrue, 2 is untrue, 3 is the same as x.com

1 is true: if you control the web server, you control whether the content is published as readable by anonymous visitors.

2 is true: if you disagree, provide the name of that singular corporation. To be clear, you're always relying on corporations, but there's no single gatekeeper.

3 is not the same: if I see something published on "www.water.dcceew.nsw.gov.au" I can be reasonably confident that it is published by my local Government. If I see an X account of @NSWDCCEEW_Water then I need to start looking for context clues, most of which can be faked.

1. You don't control the wordpress.com or tumblr.com web server

2. Wordpress or Tumblr respectively

3. but it's not, it's dcceew.tumblr.com or dcceew.wordpress.com

Assuming this is a goodfaith argument for a second !

You can host a wordpress wherever you like with whichever provider you like or even on a potato in a closet. The format and data are open and can be switched to any platform at any time without an account or login.

RSS !

you can't own wordpress.com though

Technical competence can be acquired as needed. Or more likely the other way around, the government creates an entity that provides this competence to other government entities.

> It's because X is chosen (wrongfully) as the main communications channel of all kinds of important public institutions and people (police departments, city administrations, politicians, etc.).

What's really crazy about all this is that it isn't even necessary. I get emergency alerts from my county for things like severe weather warnings, mosquito spraying, etc. You know how I get them? Text messages and email. And you know how I find out more if I want to? I go to their website.

Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company. For many people and the companies or organizations they lead, “everyone uses X/Twitter” and/or “everyone can access X/Twitter”.

We got to this state because, when it was called Twitter, it positioned itself in the market as, exactly this. It’s only now, when there’s been some major changes to it, that we’re paying the piper.

> Text message alerts and a website require some level of technical know-how from someone at the company.

Note that I was talking about my county's government, not a company. My sense is that whatever level of technical competence county governments have is pretty much the floor on technical competence. If they can do it, any company that can't doesn't deserve to be a company anyway.

I said organization on purpose to also include governments, especially local and small ones in the middle of nowhere.

I have no clue what my local government or any such authority could possibly tweet that would be relevant to me. I have not checked their twitter feeds ever and I am none the worse for wear.

Emergency notifications, mainly.

Such as what exactly? I imagine that comes through multiple channels.

Some people have Wifi but not cell phone signal. A single tweet has very robust, existing infrastructure, over the “one email per person in a mailing list” style of email; and SMS is DoA when there’s no cell phone.

No phone, no TV, only a PC that they sit at logged in to Twitter all day refreshing their feed in case a local emergency comes up?

They have a cell phone on them because they have WiFi in their house, because they have Internet, and they have notifications turned on to their local emergency servers. Since Twitter has a push notifications and a shorter refresh timer, you get messages more regularly that you’ll actually read.

Compare that to email, which you’d get hundreds of messages a day and only care about 3 of them, so you’re not constantly checking.

Edit: dude you live in Australia. Do you know how people in the Bush get their emergency updates that they need to respond to urgently? I bet at least some of them use Twitter or something similar to it. They're not huddled around their weather radio all day (and that doesn't cover everything). Because I had family in rural California and that is exactly how they got theirs. Twitter and Facebook.

I can't imagine a disaster apocalyptic enough to take out cell phone service but somehow spare the power and the internet. Seems like one of those things that you would never have to prepare for and be alright.

There are places that don’t … have … sufficient cell service, as a starting point.

The mountain passes near me have government-run twitter accounts, and it's usually the fastest way to get rich information on their status during storms.

There is a state government website with some of the same information, but it's usually more coarse (sometimes just the open/close status) and updated less frequently.

For the most obscene example, life safety critical announcements during disasters.

Usually just information about events, road closures etc.

>life safety critical announcements during disasters

There is no way twitter is the sole channel of this over say pushing a text message like they do every other week with a silver alert. Just ridiculous to imagine twitter is some disaster tool.

I deleted my twitter account when Elon took over and haven’t missed anything important.

Maybe if people didn't make services like XCancel, the impracticality of X would be more salient.

It isn't. We know this because there was a time before xcancel and people just accepted they needed an account.

It can happen - nobody would post an Instagram link to HN. But for X it did not happen.

Notice the EU's Digital Markets Act is a liability shield for Nitter instances hosted in the EU.

Nitter existed well before Twitter first experimented with requiring a login wall to read posts.

People used it because it provided a lighter, cleaner interface, because it avoided Twitter's user tracking, and because it was reasonably useful without Javascript.

(I don't disagree that X has moved beyond the pale, but Nitter was a real boon in the past)

That assumes the people who need XCancel most are aware of its existence, but from what I can tell only folks like us are.

In the time before xcancel, nobody was aware of xcancel, that's correct.

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