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Mastodon is awesome. I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communic

Mastodon is awesome. I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens. Large companies should adopt Mastodon as well. People can easily receive news and comment on them. But none of them will have the best people in ai, and blockchain, and finance, and rockets engineering, and commidians, etc. in a single website to not only deliver the news but also help make sense of it. Now, it's a real pain to just find the instance that hosts the real account of your favorite multimillion news organization, let alone some world-class expert in a very niche topic that became the topic-du-jour for some reason.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens. nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum. On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  I don't understand why it should be the one or the other. RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter. And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing). Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >I don't understand why it should be the one or the other. In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue. RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0] >Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform. But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this. 0: https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed
gaius_baltar 3y ago
> I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens. EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/ https://social.network.europa.eu/

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens. nothing is stopping them, except the fact that (user facing) tech in govt. tends to be 20 years behind. There is some out of the way dropbox to write once the govt. does want feedback. But in general snail mail is the "recommeded" way to reach a representative if you can't participare in a physical forum. On the rest of your comment, I wish RSS feeds didn't fall by the wayside. We don't need one big website hosting all those best people, and we see the results when that central point collapses. RSS feeds add a small bit of friction but you get almost all the benefits of centralization without its downsides. The main part missing was curation (AFAIK): have some place to categorize your site and its features (comments, post submissions, type of moderation, etc), have it be easily searchable and sortable by various metrics, and if you like the site you add it to your feed. Lots of custom sites still use stuff like Disqus so you may not even need a new account to make comments.

ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
I don't understand why it should be the one or the other. RSS is still needed because, despite all of this, not everyone was/is on Twitter. And I'm sure 99.999% of people on Twitter don't want to be bothered by creating and maintaining their own website or blog. Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics (and, no, comments aren't the same thing). Even if RSS was still in its heyday, a twitter of some sort is still being to be a need.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >I don't understand why it should be the one or the other. In theory, it doesn't have to be. In practice, one cannibalizes the other. I don't necessarily blame Twitter, but Twitter isn't incentivized to let people know that they can grab their feed from outside the app/website. There inlies the issue. RSS can definitely work alongside centralized microblogging platforms. You can (or used to) grab an RSS feed for a specific subreddit, and you can unofficially generate RSS feeds from twitter in several ways[0] >Also, these are 2 totally different mediums with 2 different types of content, and 2 different publisher/reader dynamics The idea isn't to end microblogging. It's that you don't put all your eggs in one basket and end up confused on where to go when that basket is suddenly full of nazis. Some may simply wander around until the next big basket pops up, but it should always be emphasized that it's easier than ever to whip up your own platform. But as we've seen the biggest issue of a new platform is discoverability. In theory, an RSS Feed + some curation for feeds to subscribe to solves this. 0: https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed https://rss.app/rss-feed/create-twitter-rss-feed

gaius_baltar 3y ago

> I wish every government would establish a national instance to deliver public announcements and create channels for easy and fast communication with their citizens. EU did it some time ago: https://social.network.europa.eu/ https://social.network.europa.eu/