The obvious solution for these kinds of public entities is to spin up a mastodon instance to post their own alerts and updates that the public can subscribe to. That way the city is not beholden to someone else’s platform philosophy…if only everyone could agree to one social web protocol.
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
504 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
62853 readers
6344 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Each city running its own? No, that's way too much duplication of effort. Maybe have one run by the federal government, like the .gov domain.
If it's unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.
If it's distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it's more asshole-resistant.
Why would we ever elect an asshole president though?
America elected Andrew Jackson and we learned our lesson. /s
People voted for him because he was a war hero and said fuck the banks. As a result, when he was elected he paid off the national debt. I don't mean he didn't run a deficit, he paid off the entire balance.
If you think Trump is comparable, just look at the deficit he left us
Meanwhile, he also held degenerate parties at the WH (actually pretty cool) and committed horrible wholesale atrocities against native Americans (very not cool).
And yet, rated as an above average president by historians. Trump is somewhere at the bottom of the pile
Not native historians lol
The city government spinning up its own instance makes sense. You could then have accounts for the various departments, transit, road and highway, parks and rec, the library, the mayor’s office…
"Asshole resistant" sounds like marketing terms used to advertise a dildo to a community that enjoys consentual non-consent.
Like they want a dildo that doesn't go into assholes easily.
How about a state/province level instance for municipal affairs?
Reasonable, but I think there would be more reliability and adoption if provided by the federal government. For example, I don't really trust states like Alabama to run services like this properly.
I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.
I would trust a guy named Shank who sells fake IDs on the bus more than I trust the incoming federal administration.
At least you know Shank is on your side. No ulterior motive working for the billionaire class. He's just as fucked by the system as you are.
Why not all of the above? Each state can run their own and smaller cities and towns can use it. If larger cities want to host their own, then they can do that instead of relying on state instance.
Running an instance is pretty trivial from a sysadmin standpoint, so I do lean towards smaller entities just running their own, to prevent monolithic censorship.
They can just disable comments so they don’t have to moderate anything. A county could run just a read-only instance that would have a community for every department that needed to do public communication. The road department could post about a bridge closure, the conservation district could promote a volunteer event, and so forth.
The fed should probably have their own instance, and the states should each have theirs as well.
Remember who's running DOGEfficicency
Every city in the western world already has at least one rack of servers running 24/7. The have their own domain names, they have a web presence, etc -- running a mastodon instance on existing infrastructure hardly qualifies as wasteful.
I could see the state having the infrastructure but like the agencies cloning the default and putting in their agency specific stuff.
"Asshole resistant"
I love that concept.
I don't think they realize how easy (and low risk) it can be to set up a Mastodon server. Particularly when you don't have to allow the public to create accounts.
They do. Government orgs are just extremely slow and have a lot of stupid ass inefficiencies.
I did contracting work for a gov website that involved a revamp. It took two years for the work to get to me, one month for me to finish my first pass, and then three more years before it finally launched.
Five years.
Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.
Iirc you can subscribe to any mastodon account via RSS already no?
But yes, regardless I think RSS is a must.
Yes, that is why I said "Sounds great".
Ahh OK. Makes sense now. I just read it wrong at first.
"After careful consideration, CTA has decided to suspend the use of its general information....accounts on Twitter/X.com
NOICE
CTA riders are encouraged to sign up for our subscription alerts available via text/email
NOOOOO WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS
because the goal isn't for more transparency in their service, CTA is mismanaged trash rn. It's to have less transparency, so less people realize that the delays between trains still have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and likely never will.
As should everyone.
And they should make Mastadon accounts or instances instead, especially if they're affiliated with the government.
It's insane to me that public utilities and officials use a private, third-party thing like X for official communications when they could be controlling their own servers.
I thought that band broke up years ago - they must be like 80 now.
not only are they still at it but they're firmly in the "kicking ass" column while their remaining contemporaries are increasingly being filed under "no really it's ok you can retire now please" category
And here I am thinking at first glance they were talking about the band
They haven't used that name since 1969. You just wake up from a coma?
