C'mon. I'm totally into tech etc and even I don't use any RSS based tools. Warning systems need to hook into the platforms people are already using. People aren't going to go out of their way to sign up to an alert that will probably never happen.
I don't think there's any country where most people use Twitter at all, much less use it often enough that they would incidentally see an emergency alert from their local government.
The point is that in an alternate reality, in the absence of terrible experiences like Twitter and Reddit controlling what we see with algorithms, RSS tools we have greater personal control of are what we could be/should be using instead.
They almost always do have a website and self hosted stuff. That no one uses. So the government and companies also try to reach out to platforms where they people are. Which was once TV and radio. Is now social media.
So presumably that means more services than just Twitter? Because (at least in the US) most people don't use Twitter. That's not a recent thing, that's always been the case.
A third party service who's contracted to do it would be the right move in that case. Operating critical processes through a company with no obligation to provide that service is dumb. The evidence is in the outcome here.
We trust the metro companies to run critical infrastructure for our cities, I am sure they can organise a website.
Aren't RSS feeds a pull mechanism for end users? With social media, it ends up acting like a push to the user so that they get notifications in "near-realtime", which would be important for events like flash floods.
RSS is a great, albeit forgotten, technology. The problem is the social media-obsessed NPCs of the world don't know how to use it. It didn't help that all the major browser vendors removed the technology and you need a standalone client these days.
Let's not. Everybody has different amounts of time to spend on forming their opinion about a given topic. If there's a topic you care about, and someone hasn't yet thought about it as much as you, in no way does that imply they're an unthinking automaton and it certainly gives you no grounds to call them one.
Personally I found the shuffles with the API a huge pain. I have a small bot and I previously just used a command line client to post my automated tweets.
With the API changes and new keys those clients all stopped working and the maintainers were uninterested in fixing them.
So now I have to implement oauth myself. Which as a busy person and poor programmer is a significant amount of work.
I went with paying IFTT a few dollars per month for now (because their API just lets me use a bearer key) but I suspect people/organisations that don't prioritize twitter won't bother.
Edit: I just checked an it looks like there might be some wrappers around the twitter interface now (twurl and twitter-api-client look promising) so perhaps time to revist.
Because when Apple does something to annoy or inconvenience existing users, it at least benefits Apple. They are pursuing what they see as rational self-interest.
What's happening at Twitter benefits nobody including the person who's giving the orders. It's completely inscrutable.
The Twitter API changes seem to have no real reasoning behind them whatsoever, except "well maybe we could squeeze more money out of the developers", which isn't likely to result in sympathetic attitudes.
In contrast, one could argue that Apple's API changes are generally intended to achieve some actual purpose (refactoring, better security, etc.) Of course, whether or not they succeed at that is a separate debate entirely.
Twitter got popular because people want to post small updates without managing a full blown website server and still be somewhat professional looking. Facebook was too informal at the time, and that's partly why WordPress was very very popular at the time.
Hadnt realised Twitter put in place limits like that. So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.
> So literally they are blocking their power users, the ones who make the most content for other users.
AND they've made changes to their site which have rendered it impractical to use as a public "status page" -- for logged-out visitors, posts on an account's profile page are ordered by the number of likes, not chronologically, and pages for individual posts don't display replies.
Take a look at what this does to the National Weather Service's page, for example [1]. What's on top? Posts from years ago warning about hurricanes that have long since passed. They're still making posts about active weather threats, but there's no way to see them if you aren't logged in -- so it's no longer an effective way to reach the public at large. Nor does it help that their widget for embedding a Twitter feed on a web site has been broken for over a month [2]!
Musks’s bizarre decisions in running Twitter seem to stem from a belief that the Twitter platform itself is what draws in users, rather than the content on the platform. It’s quite baffling how someone who seems to spend every waking moment on the service has such a poor understanding of it.
I can't be convinced that this whole situation isn't just a group of tyrannical regimes and finance heavies clubbing together to bury Twitter (often used as a co-ordination place against their interests) and are simply using Musk as a front man because they have leverage over him.
Or maybe the worlds greatest genius just got in a dick waving contest with himself and lost.
It's an attack on progressives. That's how I've been viewing all of this. I can believe Zuckerberg is not a fan of Musks handling because Z tried to keep his users but manipulate their beliefs via targeted political posts (and this worked to some degree). Musk screwed the pooch and is just kicking out his users, which doesn't disempower them, it just makes them look elsewhere.
Interesting - but I don’t assume malicious intent when incompetence is a simpler explanation. Wealth does not imply universal competence, though it often gives its beneficiaries such a delusion.
Yeah Musk could probably have made back the majority of his investment just selling Twitter Japan to SoftBank. He only seems to be interested in the US anyway
In the real world, localities are routinely using Line or Twitter to send information to inhabitants. This is maybe on top of some paper fliers or announcements on loudspeakers.
I don't know what this looks like in other countries, but we're talking about telling people about something, not updating your registered address.
A lot of the stamp stuff has been phased out during covid. I just went to the tax office the other week to change a business status thing, and while the form still had a spot for an inkan, they said it was no longer in use.
And more and more stuff can be done by scanning your MyNumber card now as well.
These services should have an always up web page. With an RSS feed. So anybody can connect to it and shove the warnings out however they want.