<story><title>B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations</title><url>https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/highlights/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>&amp;gt; What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols.&lt;p&gt;An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn&amp;#x27;t go out. Maybe that changes one day, maybe it doesn&amp;#x27;t. But that&amp;#x27;s the reality today.</text></item><item><author>mcv</author><text>&amp;gt; Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reaperducer</author><text>&lt;i&gt;An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn&amp;#x27;t go out.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Except that emergency broadcasts (at least where I live) interrupt all television signals, all radio stations, all cable TV channels, all cell phones (unless you&amp;#x27;ve intentionally disabled them), and one place I lived they even appeared on satellite TV channels.  They even go out on satellite radio in North America.  Then, if things get really bad, klaxons blare.&lt;p&gt;Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn&amp;#x27;t make sense.</text></comment>
<story><title>B.C. government hit tweet limit amid wildfire evacuations</title><url>https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/highlights/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>slashdev</author><text>&amp;gt; What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols.&lt;p&gt;An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn&amp;#x27;t go out. Maybe that changes one day, maybe it doesn&amp;#x27;t. But that&amp;#x27;s the reality today.</text></item><item><author>mcv</author><text>&amp;gt; Experts say it spells the end of social media as a reliable platform during an emergency.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m glad that the second line of the article already draws the correct conclusion from this.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t rely on proprietary infrastructure you have no control over for essential public functionality. What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. The Dutch government is already setting up its own Mastodon instance, which is a start.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>verandaguy</author><text>Speaking as someone whose experience with the fediverse has been thus far pretty underwhelming: this could actually be a great use case for activitypub if phone OSes can implement first-class support.&lt;p&gt;I think this could make sense since it&amp;#x27;s effectively an application&amp;#x2F;presentation layer abstraction, platform-agnostic, free to use, and with servers available for licence-fee-free on-prem hosting, e.g. by the governments trying to send these alerts out -- so govts could be responsible for uptime as well as how to present data to users.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this raises in my mind two issues:&lt;p&gt;- How can this clearly improve on the existing emergency alert systems? (I&amp;#x27;m thinking better geographic granularity and rich media, but that might not be a strong argument)&lt;p&gt;- Would most people be ok with having this software on their phones? (This is coming from a place of having friends and relatives who still believe COVID exposure alerts were a government spying program of some kind)&lt;p&gt;This is also working on the assumption that the government is both technically competent and design-minded enough to both have high uptime and present data in a readable way, and I may very well be ignoring some downsides of using ActivityPub that I just don&amp;#x27;t know about.</text></comment>