The obvious solution for these kinds of public entities is to spin up a mastodon instance to post their own alerts and updates that the public can subscribe to. That way the city is not beholden to someone else’s platform philosophy…if only everyone could agree to one social web protocol.
Each city running its own? No, that’s way too much duplication of effort. Maybe have one run by the federal government, like the .gov domain.
If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.
If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.
The city government spinning up its own instance makes sense. You could then have accounts for the various departments, transit, road and highway, parks and rec, the library, the mayor’s office…
Why would we ever elect an asshole president though?
America elected Andrew Jackson and we learned our lesson. /s
People voted for him because he was a war hero and said fuck the banks. As a result, when he was elected he paid off the national debt. I don’t mean he didn’t run a deficit, he paid off the entire balance.
If you think Trump is comparable, just look at the deficit he left us
Meanwhile, he also held degenerate parties at the WH (actually pretty cool) and committed horrible wholesale atrocities against native Americans (very not cool).
“Asshole resistant” sounds like marketing terms used to advertise a dildo to a community that enjoys consentual non-consent.
Like they want a dildo that doesn’t go into assholes easily.
Every city in the western world already has at least one rack of servers running 24/7. The have their own domain names, they have a web presence, etc – running a mastodon instance on existing infrastructure hardly qualifies as wasteful.
How about a state/province level instance for municipal affairs?
I don’t think they realize how easy (and low risk) it can be to set up a Mastodon server. Particularly when you don’t have to allow the public to create accounts.
They do. Government orgs are just extremely slow and have a lot of stupid ass inefficiencies.
I did contracting work for a gov website that involved a revamp. It took two years for the work to get to me, one month for me to finish my first pass, and then three more years before it finally launched.
Five years.
"After careful consideration, CTA has decided to suspend the use of its general information…accounts on Twitter/X.com
NOICE
CTA riders are encouraged to sign up for our subscription alerts available via text/email
NOOOOO WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS
As should everyone.
And they should make Mastadon accounts or instances instead, especially if they’re affiliated with the government.
It’s insane to me that public utilities and officials use a private, third-party thing like X for official communications when they could be controlling their own servers.
And here I am thinking at first glance they were talking about the band
They haven’t used that name since 1969. You just wake up from a coma?
