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> What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is ju

> What governments should be doing is set up their own social media servers sharing across all open protocols. An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. Maybe that changes one day, maybe it doesn't. But that's the reality today.

reaperducer 3y ago
An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. 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'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. Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  > Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense. The comment you are responding to is not doing that. The point was that there is little value is using a niche social media platform for emergency broadcasts because so few people use it. Sure, once you have the bigger platforms covered, there's no harm in adding smaller ones, but people calling to ditch twitter and use mastodon or some other service are being silly.
  - jakelazaroff 3y ago
    Why ditch one? Just post to both.
    - alexandre_m 3y ago
      Exactly. You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.
- altdataseller 3y ago
  Where do the klaxons blare from? And who decides to blare the klaxons?
  - irrational 3y ago
    I’ve never lived in a tornado area, but my understanding is they do have these as a tornado warning device in those areas.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    Here in tornado country we have sirens that are used to warn of tornados. They're controlled by the county. They test them every Wednesday afternoon. You're supposed to tune in to news to find out what's going on. They're just an alert to tell you something (usually a tornado) is going on. They also were to be used in case of atomic attack. If you hear the siren you're supposed to seek shelter and then tune in to find out what's going on. This is an effective way for dealing with any emergency, even outside of tornados.
    - yurishimo 3y ago
      In the Netherlands, emergency sirens are tested at Noon on the first monday of every month for 1 minute. If you hear a siren at any other time, it's serious and you seek out more information from sources relevant to your area.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    > Where do the klaxons blare from? Everywhere in a city, and more scattered the farther you go out. If you ever lived in the Midwest, it's the same things that do the monthly-or-whatever tornado alert tests (and real tornado alerts). > And who decides to blare the klaxons? Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever
    - tivert 3y ago
      > Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever It's definitely city-level, in at least some places. I know because I was visiting a friend and heard the sirens go off. I assumed it was a tornado warning (i.e. actually serious), but it turns out that city (and only that city in the area) is dumb and blare the sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings, basically crying wolf every time.
- taeric 3y ago
  Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though? Yes, signal usage is a bit easier to jump on top of as the government regulates those uses of signals. There really isn't a way to do that on the internet. Best they can have is to regulate that Twitter has to give them unlimited limits in emergency cases. Which, yes, they should do. This will annoy a ton of "free market" folks, as it will almost certainly make it harder to enter the market as a competitor. Will look a lot like regulatory capture, all told.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though? No, government owned cell towers, military owned cell towers, etc., also send out the signal, so even if every commercially owned cell tower suddenly vanished most cities will still be covered by enough signal strength for a few hundred bytes of text.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Emergency broadcast isn’t quite the word. Canada also has a similar emergency broadcast mechanism. This is more like updates on an ongoing situation. Social media is a reasonable way to deliver that.
whizzter 3y ago
Well that actually brings us to an interesting point, most platforms have fought with tooth and nails to retain carrier like status to avoid liability issues related to copyright infringement,etc but if they do that they should also be liable in all relevant jurisdictions to provide emergency alert services,etc.
verandaguy 3y ago
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. I think this could make sense since it's effectively an application/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. Of course, this raises in my mind two issues: - How can this clearly improve on the existing emergency alert systems? (I'm thinking better geographic granularity and rich media, but that might not be a strong argument) - 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) 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't know about.
- taeric 3y ago
  Phones already have emergency broadcast support. I really only ever see it go off for amber alerts. May be specifically for that, at the moment? Not sure.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    I think Trump's tenure saw use of presidential alert use ( flag on your android you can't turn off .. easily ).
    - jjkaczor 3y ago
      In Ontario Canada (maybe the same in other provinces), every Amber alert goes out at the highest level - Presidential/Nuclear. There was also no geo-fencing initially (perhaps there is now), but as horrible as a child abduction is - notifying people at 3am who are more than 8-hrs driving distance away is... not useful. Have also seen extreme weather alerts, and one nuclear warning.
skerit 3y ago
Even if the tweet goes out, you might not see it because you hit your daily limit of tweets. Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.
dgellow 3y ago
You could have a system that broadcast on multiple platforms at once. They could for example have a kind of lightweight append only list of broadcast (let’s say something based on ATProto) on their own infra, and insertions are replicated to Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, whatever. In case of issue with one platform at least a place where to broadcast still exists and people can share it, create new copies, share on their own timelines, or other creative alternative ways to share the broadcast.

reaperducer 3y ago

An emergency broadcast that reaches nobody is just as useful as a tweet that doesn't go out. 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'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. Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.

shkkmo 3y ago
> Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense. The comment you are responding to is not doing that. The point was that there is little value is using a niche social media platform for emergency broadcasts because so few people use it. Sure, once you have the bigger platforms covered, there's no harm in adding smaller ones, but people calling to ditch twitter and use mastodon or some other service are being silly.
- jakelazaroff 3y ago
  Why ditch one? Just post to both.
  - alexandre_m 3y ago
    Exactly. You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.
altdataseller 3y ago
Where do the klaxons blare from? And who decides to blare the klaxons?
- irrational 3y ago
  I’ve never lived in a tornado area, but my understanding is they do have these as a tornado warning device in those areas.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Here in tornado country we have sirens that are used to warn of tornados. They're controlled by the county. They test them every Wednesday afternoon. You're supposed to tune in to news to find out what's going on. They're just an alert to tell you something (usually a tornado) is going on. They also were to be used in case of atomic attack. If you hear the siren you're supposed to seek shelter and then tune in to find out what's going on. This is an effective way for dealing with any emergency, even outside of tornados.
  - yurishimo 3y ago
    In the Netherlands, emergency sirens are tested at Noon on the first monday of every month for 1 minute. If you hear a siren at any other time, it's serious and you seek out more information from sources relevant to your area.
- dmoy 3y ago
  > Where do the klaxons blare from? Everywhere in a city, and more scattered the farther you go out. If you ever lived in the Midwest, it's the same things that do the monthly-or-whatever tornado alert tests (and real tornado alerts). > And who decides to blare the klaxons? Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever It's definitely city-level, in at least some places. I know because I was visiting a friend and heard the sirens go off. I assumed it was a tornado warning (i.e. actually serious), but it turns out that city (and only that city in the area) is dumb and blare the sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings, basically crying wolf every time.
taeric 3y ago
Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though? Yes, signal usage is a bit easier to jump on top of as the government regulates those uses of signals. There really isn't a way to do that on the internet. Best they can have is to regulate that Twitter has to give them unlimited limits in emergency cases. Which, yes, they should do. This will annoy a ton of "free market" folks, as it will almost certainly make it harder to enter the market as a competitor. Will look a lot like regulatory capture, all told.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > Interrupting all signals that are in use by commercial companies, is still ultimately relying on commercial infrastructure, though? No, government owned cell towers, military owned cell towers, etc., also send out the signal, so even if every commercially owned cell tower suddenly vanished most cities will still be covered by enough signal strength for a few hundred bytes of text.
slashdev 3y ago
Emergency broadcast isn’t quite the word. Canada also has a similar emergency broadcast mechanism. This is more like updates on an ongoing situation. Social media is a reasonable way to deliver that.

whizzter 3y ago

Well that actually brings us to an interesting point, most platforms have fought with tooth and nails to retain carrier like status to avoid liability issues related to copyright infringement,etc but if they do that they should also be liable in all relevant jurisdictions to provide emergency alert services,etc.

verandaguy 3y ago

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. I think this could make sense since it's effectively an application/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. Of course, this raises in my mind two issues: - How can this clearly improve on the existing emergency alert systems? (I'm thinking better geographic granularity and rich media, but that might not be a strong argument) - 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) 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't know about.

taeric 3y ago
Phones already have emergency broadcast support. I really only ever see it go off for amber alerts. May be specifically for that, at the moment? Not sure.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I think Trump's tenure saw use of presidential alert use ( flag on your android you can't turn off .. easily ).
  - jjkaczor 3y ago
    In Ontario Canada (maybe the same in other provinces), every Amber alert goes out at the highest level - Presidential/Nuclear. There was also no geo-fencing initially (perhaps there is now), but as horrible as a child abduction is - notifying people at 3am who are more than 8-hrs driving distance away is... not useful. Have also seen extreme weather alerts, and one nuclear warning.

skerit 3y ago

Even if the tweet goes out, you might not see it because you hit your daily limit of tweets. Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.

dgellow 3y ago

You could have a system that broadcast on multiple platforms at once. They could for example have a kind of lightweight append only list of broadcast (let’s say something based on ATProto) on their own infra, and insertions are replicated to Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, whatever. In case of issue with one platform at least a place where to broadcast still exists and people can share it, create new copies, share on their own timelines, or other creative alternative ways to share the broadcast.