this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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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.
I wonder where city municipal Twitter accounts will move to for emergency communications now that Twitter is quickly becoming useless and irrelevant.
ActivityPub or whatever BlueSky calls theirs could end up being the perfect protocols for truly Public online spaces, managed by governments in the same sense that they manage public meatspace
I am sympathetic to the frustrations people are having around private corporations owning & controlling something as important to communications as social media. & when these companies are run by CEOs who are... suspect, it's a reminder about just how fickle and agnostic to user experience their ecosystems really are. I mean in some sense, that's why we're here on the fediverse now, & not somewhere else. But I very much do not want the administration of public online spaces and networks to be the responsibility of the government. The potential for abuse is too great.
It could be that the best solution for our moment in time is a handful of beneficent individuals running servers out of their closets. It's crazy, but it's kind of cool.