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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
by 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 agoPhones 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 agoI think Trump's tenure saw use of presidential alert use ( flag on your android you can't turn off .. easily ).
- jjkaczor 3y agoIn 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.