Except that emergency broadcasts (at least where I live) interrupt all television signals, all radio stations, all cable TV channels, all cell phones (unless you've intentionally disabled them), and one place I lived they even appeared on satellite TV channels. They even go out on satellite radio in North America. Then, if things get really bad, klaxons blare.

Comparing emergency broadcasts to social media doesn't make sense.

This is more like updates on an ongoing situation. Social media is a reasonable way to deliver that.

Yes, signal usage is a bit easier to jump on top of as the government regulates those uses of signals. There really isn't a way to do that on the internet. Best they can have is to regulate that Twitter has to give them unlimited limits in emergency cases. Which, yes, they should do.

This will annoy a ton of "free market" folks, as it will almost certainly make it harder to enter the market as a competitor. Will look a lot like regulatory capture, all told.

No, government owned cell towers, military owned cell towers, etc., also send out the signal, so even if every commercially owned cell tower suddenly vanished most cities will still be covered by enough signal strength for a few hundred bytes of text.

If you hear the siren you're supposed to seek shelter and then tune in to find out what's going on. This is an effective way for dealing with any emergency, even outside of tornados.

Everywhere in a city, and more scattered the farther you go out.

If you ever lived in the Midwest, it's the same things that do the monthly-or-whatever tornado alert tests (and real tornado alerts).

> And who decides to blare the klaxons?

Depends on the situation. But it's not nationally controlled, so it depends on where you live. City or county or whatever

It's definitely city-level, in at least some places. I know because I was visiting a friend and heard the sirens go off. I assumed it was a tornado warning (i.e. actually serious), but it turns out that city (and only that city in the area) is dumb and blare the sirens for severe thunderstorm warnings, basically crying wolf every time.

Even in America, I can't imagine someone suing the city because they got injured during a storm, let alone winning their case and making the city pay.

The real story was someone got killed by lighting, and the city decided to "do something" so that never happened again. However, IMHO, they're going to shoot themselves in the foot because their citizens are going to be less papered for a tornado, which could kill many more people.

In Germany, you absolutely can. It's called "Verkehrssicherungspflicht". Given how Americans can get sued by a random child wandering onto their property and injuring themselves on a trampoline or a swimming pool, even if the area is fenced off, I assumed that liability for natural disasters would be just as insane.

Here it's mostly fire departments and town halls that have the sirens, and they are controlled by the town hall, département (one level above) and the interior ministry, so each of these level can decide to blare the sirens it is responsible for.

It basically never happens except in real bad circumstances.

Actually I said "here" but I don't live in France most of the time, and here in Belgium it's only based on the phone network now, no sirens anymore.

The comment you are responding to is not doing that.

The point was that there is little value is using a niche social media platform for emergency broadcasts because so few people use it.

Sure, once you have the bigger platforms covered, there's no harm in adding smaller ones, but people calling to ditch twitter and use mastodon or some other service are being silly.

You should publish to multiple platforms if the message is deemed important. Nothing wrong with duplicating messages across private and public infrastructure websites.

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.

Have also seen extreme weather alerts, and one nuclear warning.

Think of Mastodon what you want, but a government using an open standard for communication should be applauded.

In case of issue with one platform at least a place where to broadcast still exists and people can share it, create new copies, share on their own timelines, or other creative alternative ways to share the broadcast.