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It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requ

by koyote 27d ago

It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration). I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.

deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
parineum 27d ago
as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
- marcosdumay 27d ago
  As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read. That said, RSS seems way simpler.
  - parineum 27d ago
    I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together? RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
    - cxr 27d ago
      Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
      - parineum 27d ago
        I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news. How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts? We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
        cxr 27d ago
        > We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy. That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS. (The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.) > People don't know what an rss feed is. I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially. The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
    - marcosdumay 27d ago
      Yes, you can subscribe from whatever instance you want. (I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)
    - mitxela 26d ago
      You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server. It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
  - numpad0 27d ago
    RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.
    - mitxela 26d ago
      We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.
  - prmoustache 27d ago
    A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.
quadrifoliate 27d ago
> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done. So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
- bentcorner 27d ago
  I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
- misstuned 27d ago
  I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X. A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
  - rob74 27d ago
    More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...
    - mitxela 26d ago
      At least WhatsApp isn't enshittified yet.
  - mitxela 26d ago
    What's their account? I think it would be useful to have a fault-isolated Nitter set up just for such important accounts.
numpad0 27d ago
There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.
- koyote 27d ago
  Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites: Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates. I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
  - progval 27d ago
    Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.
  - croon 27d ago
    > some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management. If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.
    - loloquwowndueo 27d ago
      Access management is already a problem - just maybe they haven’t run into it. What happens when the employee who has the twitter password leaves? (This is France so the only way is probably retirement). A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.
charcircuit 27d ago
X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.
- me-vs-cat 27d ago
  I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.
- rlw_sp 27d ago
  You have to give your phone number and are then tracked for what you view.
  - mitxela 26d ago
    A more practical consideration for most people, though, is that the app is full of shit. I mean really full of shit. You open the app and it just spews a torrent of shit at your eyeballs until you close it, mixed with the occasional nugget of gold. Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.

by koyote 27d ago

deleted 27d ago

[deleted]

parineum 27d ago

as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.

marcosdumay 27d ago
As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read. That said, RSS seems way simpler.
- parineum 27d ago
  I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together? RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
  - cxr 27d ago
    Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
    - parineum 27d ago
      I thought I was more clear than I was being about rss in the context of the conversation about text based news. How many people consuming text via rss the same way people consume audio via podcasts? We're talking about text here. We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. Everyone used to have a blog and nobody really cared. Now everyone has a podcast and (more) people do. People don't know what an rss feed is.
      - cxr 27d ago
        > We all know how this sentence ends, "You should start a ..." and it isn't rss feed. I don't know what this means. I'm guessing the correct answer is supposed to be "podcast"? Even so, weird false dichotomy. That looking at tweets and listening to podcasts is more popular than reading long-form blog posts via RSS has a lot more to do with people's revealed preference for looking at tweets and listening to podcasts versus reading long-form blogs than it has to do with RSS. (The actual context was delivery of notices by public services through non-Twitter feeds, anyway. Not blogging.) > People don't know what an rss feed is. I don't know why you think this is relevant here. It seems that when you're referring to using "RSS", what you mean is for people to care about RSS—in the way that Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. have always been about caring about (and almost exclusively using them to talk about) Gemini, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc. than they ever were actually expected to be used organically and non-self-referentially. The fact is that people (already/still) use RSS today. It hasn't been defeated. And Twitter could turn into an RSS-based feed reader tomorrow that works basically the same as it works today, and then suddenly everyone would be using RSS but no one would drop out because of it. Because people don't know (read: care) what an RSS feed is.
  - marcosdumay 27d ago
    Yes, you can subscribe from whatever instance you want. (I'm not a mastodon user either. But I've read the docs.)
  - mitxela 26d ago
    You can follow them both from your own mastodon account on a third server. It's a technically bad solution though, because mastodon is push. The government server has to maintain a list of everyone who's subscribed and make an HTTP request to all of those random domains, and have some timeout and removal policy because sites die all the time. Pull-based, like RSS, is way cleaner.
- numpad0 27d ago
  RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.
  - mitxela 26d ago
    We need to stop focusing on the specific protocol when it's not relevant and focus more on the patterns. Wanting RSS, specifically, made sense back when everyone had an RSS reader, the same way it makes sense to have an HTML website today because everyone has a web browser. But since very few people have RSS readers now, there's infinite flexibility in the format you use to provide your feed. The most useful is probably a phone app that vibrates your phone with a notification when your train is delayed. RSS can be provided as an option.
- prmoustache 27d ago
  A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.

quadrifoliate 27d ago

> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done. So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.

bentcorner 27d ago
I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
misstuned 27d ago
I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X. A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
- rob74 27d ago
  More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...
  - mitxela 26d ago
    At least WhatsApp isn't enshittified yet.
- mitxela 26d ago
  What's their account? I think it would be useful to have a fault-isolated Nitter set up just for such important accounts.

numpad0 27d ago

There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.

koyote 27d ago
Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites: Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates. I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.
- progval 27d ago
  Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.
- croon 27d ago
  > some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management. If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.
  - loloquwowndueo 27d ago
    Access management is already a problem - just maybe they haven’t run into it. What happens when the employee who has the twitter password leaves? (This is France so the only way is probably retirement). A bespoke system with an interface similar to twitter sounds like it’d be a suitable solution. And I bet it can be vibe coded in 5 minutes.

charcircuit 27d ago

X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.

me-vs-cat 27d ago
I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.
rlw_sp 27d ago
You have to give your phone number and are then tracked for what you view.
- mitxela 26d ago
  A more practical consideration for most people, though, is that the app is full of shit. I mean really full of shit. You open the app and it just spews a torrent of shit at your eyeballs until you close it, mixed with the occasional nugget of gold. Governments should also be worried about sovereignty.