It should be that way.

My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

Public institutions especially.

There's zero excuse, none.

> There's zero excuse, none.

How about the general lack of awareness of "open platforms", or of any given one of your objections to X?

Most people are not in the HN bubble.

If it's not the case currently, it should be, that public institutions MUST make their public statements widely available. The old POSSE way seems correct. Blocked, or EULA'd or Paywalled on third-party platforms doesn't do that.

And I'm sure all of you people crying shared this same concern when it was Twitter. I'm sure you can bring receipts of you crying about it back then too.

An open platform could be as simple as hosting their own website. You don’t need to be in a “bubble” to know about websites.

“As simple as hosting their own website” is contradictory for a majority of the people using the internet.

The context of the thread is public institutions.

I promise you, most public institutions are capable of hosting a web site or running a bluesky account

They choose not to because no one uses them. To get views for political purposes you have to use social media like blue sky and the fediverse

Why should public institutions be trying to get views for political purposes? Isn't that directly contrary to the intended role of public institutions in a democracy?

Because they want to win the next election? Corruption basically.

Bingo. It's not the "institutions" doing it, it's whichever elected officials we're trusting to run it at the time abusing their positions.

We are talking about organizations here who are communicating with the public.

Go ask your mom why she never posts on her own website, but does on closed platform social media. Her answer will be the same as all the people outside of the tech bubble you're in.

My mum used to blog on her own website daily, and she's not tech savvy at all

Who bought the domain for her, and went through the hoops (usually modifying DNS records) to verify it with the blog provider?

I obviously don't know about that person's mom, but a lot of hosting platforms and blog providers will do that for you if you don't want to do it yourself.

Wordpress, I believe

This is not a conversation about mothers. The root of this thread was referring to "accessibility of public-facing government communications."

> My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

> Public institutions especially.

> There's zero excuse, none.

Maybe it wasn't their intent, but they clearly wrote it as a more general statement, with an additional and specific intolerance to public institutions, which is also how others interpreted it.

People don't seem to know about bluesky, the fediverse and the indie web enough.

Some people avoid those because they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial. That's why X hasn't disappeared like some of the HN crowd predicted.

> consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial

What's an example?

Given the fact the comment you replied to is flagged and dead? Apparently even mentioning that some ideas online may not have widespread support offline.

I thought HN predicted it would fold due to mismanagement, and arguably it would've if it hadn't been delayed by being rolled into the larger Katamari ball of securities fraud that is SpaceTeslaXAI.

And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.

> And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.

Is it? I haven't seen a Pinterest link in a while so I guess it depends on what bubble you're in.

If you're not hanging out with a lot of Gen Z women it would explain why it's not on your radar, that's their key demo and they're on a very solid growth trajectory[1].

It's no secret, meanwhile, that twitter has seen steady declines both in daily active users as well as plummeting engagement levels from those that haven't left yet.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/pins-gains...

Who or what is fediverse? How do you think it works?

It's a network of social media sites aka servers that are independently run, and have no algorithm so posts are in chronological order usually. There's several types of sites, each replacing one conventional alternative like mastodon for x/Twitter and Lemmy for reddit.

It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type. To the user, each individual site is as convenient as a conventional social media site such as x/twitter. It aims to combine the advantages of decentralization such as independence, with the advantages of centralization such as a large amount of content

One roadblock is marketing, because the first thing the fediverse sites like mastodon or Lemmy try to do when you search for them on Google is get you into a server. That sounds too technical and is not how the average person uses social media at all. Bluesky fixes this and has an entirely new idea for how the fediverse works.

One downside to the concept of servers is that besides feeling fragmented to the average user compared to bluesky or Instagram, most tend to cater to a specific audience so they filter content for you. It's not like bluesky or Instagram where the user does it entirely from scratch by following accounts (which Instagram ignores anyways)

I know what this is, I was seeing if whatthesmack understands the concept. He clearly has some deep confusions where he lists Fediverse as among the list of services that are block happy. It does not conceptually make sense to call Fediverse as being block happy anymore than saying http or ssl is block happy.

> It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type.

That's how it should work but its not how it works in practice because some admin can't stand the idea of opinions contrary to their own existing on the same network. So they deferedate from instances they don't like as well as those instances that don't do the same.

Yes, and? That's how it should work. That's the very point of it, you control your environment as you want. If you don't like someone, remove them. There is no single instance, that's the very point, its conceptually completely absurd to say a set of protocols is "block happy". Why do you feel entitled to other peoples computing real estate? There is no single "Mastodon", go and make your own and connect or don't connect to who you want.

You don't control the environment, some admin does who you cannot get away from without giving up your identity. And even if you self-host its pretty rich to say you control your environment without addressing that the community thinks its acceptable into bullying other instance operators into compliance with their witch hunts.

How is it the protocol's fault if people dislike you? You have literally no right to other peoples computing resources. Nothing in the protocol is stopping you from self hosting an instance. Its not like making another Twitter or Facebook, the software is readymade for you to install. So its frankly absurd to say a technical protocol is block-happy.

>they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved

..meanwhile, X is owned by such a person.

Elon censors people all the time

Public institutions shouldn't be posting on bsky.app or mastodon.social either. The primary source of public communications should be fully hosted on public infrastructure and only then syndicated and/or federated elsewhere.

This is one of the reasons why open protocols (like email, http, irc, &c) are so important.

I agree with the sentiment, but nowadays people don't even know that is even possible, or they just decide it's not worth it because it doesn't get a lot of views, or they think hiring someone technical to manage it is expensive so they just have the secretary of the day do it and that person is very often not technical at all so they only know how to post it on social media

Someone could certainly make a case in a lawsuit for an ADA violation. I bet if people organized, the city would listen before it got to that point

There are open meeting laws like the Brown Act but I think that only restricts relying on social media for deliberation. Not communication

There is also Lindke v. Freed (2024) which holds that public officials using social media can be sued under the First Amendment violations like blocking users or deleting comments.

What open medium would you suggest as an alternative to X?

I miss the days when we had an RFC, people got together, came up with a solution, and we ended up with decentralized NNTP or something. Everything is someone's little kingdom now.

Everything should be on their website, plus posted to the top social media (by popularity) to make it easier for people who want a push feed.

They should also post to at least one social media site that allows full reading for free without an account and supports notifications (possibly only with an account along as that is free), unless one of the top sites they post to satisfies this.

The reason for this last is so that if there is demand on some less popular medium for these posts, someone interested could build something to subscribe to the feed on the free site and repost it unofficially to the other service.

They could create their own bluesky account or fediverse server

It's called "The Web" and every government org pretty much already has a website. All they have to do is publish something on it.

I think the only thing I’d add is some kind of open and standard syndication system like RSS

You then have to figure out where the RSS button is for every website.. it's a nightmare for the average person

Browsers used to have a little RSS button either next to the address bar, or somewhere in the bottom status bar. But a propaganda corporation has been leading the charge in browser "development" for past few decades, and those do not like it when people exchange information without a centralized middleman, so use of RSS got deliberately pushed as far away from mainstream use as possible.

So of course now it's "a nightmare for the average person".

Its still not actually a nightmare because for pretty much every RSS reader you can just past the website URL into the subscribe function and it'll present you with all the feeds provided by that site sourced from <link rel="alternative"> tags. The browser feature was good for reminding people to the existence of RSS feeds but it is not required to solve the purported problem of feeds being hard to find.

Could it be intuitive on mobile? The problem is, how do we make it as simple as scrolling and tapping on the follow button so the user never even has to change apps?

I agree, but apparently that's still too difficult for the mainstream user.

It is. Like why do they have to take several steps and remember instead of being reminded

I mean, I think a small website/blog with an RSS feed would be fine. If they really want it in social media format they could host an at proto PDS.

RSS

Bluesky and the fediverse. No one outside the US and Europe uses websites for anything that isn't buying or selling something because social media gets more views even for political purposes.

Organizations very much rely on websites for the information they share. I don't even know how most data would need to be sliced to fit into tweets.

Like, how would you tweet exchange rates consistently and accessibly?

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/eu...

Microblogging, as a format, is a niche. If you do use it as an organization, you need an authoritative place on the Internet that you control, from which all other data ideally is derived. You can still mirror it to Twitter/Mastodon or whatever just fine.

Deciding to be held hostage by a third-party platform so that someone in the organization can save three clicks is just unprofessional.

Oh you mean statistical data, I see they often post progress on some public infrastructure work, you post 100 words at a time and split it across posts

>If you do use it as an organization, you need an authoritative place on the Internet that you control

This is a very American/european, technical way of thinking. The average person in those countries will ignore it at best, and see it as unnecessary at worst. It's a losing proposition because, no one reads the website. The goal is not to archive stuff but to win the next electoral campaign. So, like a company, they focus all their efforts in that direction.

The reason it's American/European is because other places got internet access only after social media was established so around 2012, so your idea for them is... A social media page. And a social media page costs zero dollars to host and can be managed by someone non technical. A dedicated web page is very often the exact opposite and thus undesirable due to cost

HTTP over TPC/IP.

Ya'll are talking lawsuits and organizing protests, but the reality is probably just that no one (outside the Bluesky/HN bubble, which is tiny) cares. Very few probably care what their local government is babbling about today in general, and even fewer what platforms they're using.

And yet if someone did care, there's a decent chance if they asked the right person in the right way they'd be like "Oh, Mastodon? Okay, sounds neat, oh you know what it's just another checkbox in the software we use to cross-post everything! I'll just check the box!"

But nah, lets not do the easy thing, lets look up legal precedent and ponder the ADA.

"Very few probably care what their local government is babbling about today in general, and even fewer what platforms they're using."

Since schools in my area started yesterday, I'll add that parents do rely on communications regarding weather, early dismissals, transportation, day care, after school activities, etc.

My experience with this type of stuff is that there's always way more people that care than people realize. But the barrier is that ONE person needs to care so much as to start organizing. Once you set up the organization, people do join and contribute. The hardest part is that first step

Newspapers are still often required to be used for certain government publications and they cost money. TwitterX is free. I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.

It is not free? You just pay them with your private information and by looking at a few ads. That is not free. Unless you believe information and time have no value?

Newspapers aren't free either. But Twitter, I mean that crappy one-letter site purchased by a chud, is still garbage. I'm definitely not defending it.

You need to make an account to access it. That's not free

Worse, you can be banned for reasons unrelated to your local laws and lose access.

I have an account and I paid zero for it. Are we talking about the same thing?

You've paid with a certain amount of personal information.

But to be fair, that's the same with a newspaper subscription.

You can't buy a newspaper at a kiosk for cash?

Good point. I think you can probably also read it for free at a library, or at work (on their paid sub however). Lots of options, true.

You're assuming I used my own information. It's the internet. You can lie.

>I'm not clear what the controversy here is exactly.

Seems pretty obvious, not every citizen has access to twitter, there's no legitimate chain of trust and there's endless potential for corruption and manipulation.

In pretty much every developed country sans the US apparently governments, even local ones, tend to be obligated to publish information through their own channels because 1. they own them so you know communication is authentic, 2. they can't ban or restrict you from accessing it, they know how that information is made available, there's no financial conflict of interest.

It's completely possible for Twitter, given that the government has no insight into its technical operations, exert influence on who sees what and how. That alone is insane for public, government communication. If the government isn't sovereign in respect to its communications infrastructure your government is run by tech oligarchs

Exactly. It‘s isn‘t just possible, we know it‘s happening.

No, and this policy goes back to publication in for-profit newspapers. Not an issue in the USA in general.

With a disclaimer that there's one zillion governmental entities on the planet overall, so its plausible that one requires no fee and no signup required.

It's not gated. You can read any non-adult post with a direct link. I'm seeing this perspective all over in here. As someone without an X account, I can only assume you all have X accounts to not know this!

You can't see replies without an account, and it is pretty common for content to be posted as a series of replies to the first post

Ah, and if that person has split their post into several messages, I can definitely read all of them from a direct link to the first message, right?

If I have a link to a local emergency department twitter handle, I can view all of their recent posts, right?

You can still view direct links, but you can’t scroll someone’s profile or use the search functionality without an account. How many I supposed to scroll a government organization’s tweets if I can only see the first few?

I presume the post is referencing principal councils in England or Wales. They're powerful enough to make life difficult, but small enough to not get a lot of oversight. From what I've heard, it's like a government-backed HOA, and they're notorious for doing whatever they want, while not letting you do what you want.