Finally. The other day while I was on a call with my girlfriend, she received an emergency alert on her phone (in the US) and wasn’t able to read it / find the message for some reason. Fearing the worst, I rushed to the city’s emergency Twitter account to see any updates, only for twitter to ask me to f-ing log in.
What a terrible feeling to have while going to the password manager, hands trembling with fear trying to sign in to the bloody & now-bastardized platform. Thankfully, it was just something related to bad weather.
Yeah, I’ve thought for a while now that these social media sites (along with utilities) should be publicly run rather than by for profit private companies (or publically traded).
Too bad we don’t really have a healthy public domain to run things like that. The fediverse is trying to do that by reducing the admins’ power, but it’s still a bunch of private instances that act public at the whim of their admins.
True but the difference is the ability to choose what you deem best. The government could simply run their own instances with their own rules (the german public television runs a mastodon instance for example) and supply information/services as they see fit.
It is irrelevant what other instance owners do or think about it because the instance owner is in control.
Why wouldn’t you/her just call the emergency number your city has? That’s incredibly easy to look up, probably a little faster than searching through Twitter.
Or even check the cities website, for that matter.
Idk, to me that’s like going to Facebook to call the police. Why would you do that?
My city just had a major storm which killed power and cell data for a ton of people. Even when the power was back on, you couldn’t use your cell phone except on WiFi because the towers were still down. Phone calls just wouldn’t get through. Even texts often didn’t get through- the pharmacy texted me on Monday to tell me my pills were ready and I went there yesterday to ask why they weren’t ready yet.
Would being able to see information on Twitter solved these problems? Of course not, but it might have at least kept me informed.
Finally. The other day while I was on a call with my girlfriend, she received an emergency alert on her phone (in the US) and wasn’t able to read it / find the message for some reason. Fearing the worst, I rushed to the city’s emergency Twitter account to see any updates, only for twitter to ask me to f-ing log in.
What a terrible feeling to have while going to the password manager, hands trembling with fear trying to sign in to the bloody & now-bastardized platform. Thankfully, it was just something related to bad weather.
Why it is a bad idea to offer public services on a for profit platform: A case study
Yeah, I’ve thought for a while now that these social media sites (along with utilities) should be publicly run rather than by for profit private companies (or publically traded).
Too bad we don’t really have a healthy public domain to run things like that. The fediverse is trying to do that by reducing the admins’ power, but it’s still a bunch of private instances that act public at the whim of their admins.
True but the difference is the ability to choose what you deem best. The government could simply run their own instances with their own rules (the german public television runs a mastodon instance for example) and supply information/services as they see fit.
It is irrelevant what other instance owners do or think about it because the instance owner is in control.
Why wouldn’t you/her just call the emergency number your city has? That’s incredibly easy to look up, probably a little faster than searching through Twitter.
Or even check the cities website, for that matter.
Idk, to me that’s like going to Facebook to call the police. Why would you do that?
My city just had a major storm which killed power and cell data for a ton of people. Even when the power was back on, you couldn’t use your cell phone except on WiFi because the towers were still down. Phone calls just wouldn’t get through. Even texts often didn’t get through- the pharmacy texted me on Monday to tell me my pills were ready and I went there yesterday to ask why they weren’t ready yet.
Would being able to see information on Twitter solved these problems? Of course not, but it might have at least kept me informed.
Same thing, man. Go to the source. Why are you relying on a middleman like Twitter?
If the phone isn’t working, how am I supposed to do that?
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