this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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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.
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).
And yet, rated as an above average president by historians. Trump is somewhere at the bottom of the pile
Not native historians lol
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…
"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.
How about a state/province level instance for municipal affairs?
Reasonable, but I think there would be more reliability and adoption if provided by the federal government. For example, I don't really trust states like Alabama to run services like this properly.
I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.
I would trust a guy named Shank who sells fake IDs on the bus more than I trust the incoming federal administration.
At least you know Shank is on your side. No ulterior motive working for the billionaire class. He's just as fucked by the system as you are.
Why not all of the above? Each state can run their own and smaller cities and towns can use it. If larger cities want to host their own, then they can do that instead of relying on state instance.
Attention the number 12 bus destination "banging your sister" is approaching the station. Roll tide.
Running an instance is pretty trivial from a sysadmin standpoint, so I do lean towards smaller entities just running their own, to prevent monolithic censorship.
They can just disable comments so they don’t have to moderate anything. A county could run just a read-only instance that would have a community for every department that needed to do public communication. The road department could post about a bridge closure, the conservation district could promote a volunteer event, and so forth.
The fed should probably have their own instance, and the states should each have theirs as well.
Remember who's running DOGEfficicency
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.
I could see the state having the infrastructure but like the agencies cloning the default and putting in their agency specific stuff.
"Asshole resistant"
I love that concept.
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.
Sounds great. I think it is super valuable to have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe in all sorts of ways. Having ActivityPub is also nice.
Iirc you can subscribe to any mastodon account via RSS already no?
But yes, regardless I think RSS is a must.
Yes, that is why I said "Sounds great".
Ahh OK. Makes sense now. I just read it wrong at first.