Technology

It's absolute insanity that something like government emergency alerts get broadcast via an unregulated, privately owned, privately run for-profit service that answers to absolutely nobody.

One would hope that this episode would bring about some rethinking, but realistically, the reaction now is probably going to be "whew, crisis averted, let's change nothing and continue exactly as before."

I wonder where city municipal Twitter accounts will move to for emergency communications now that Twitter is quickly becoming useless and irrelevant.

Why it is a bad idea to offer public services on a for profit platform: A case study

Why wouldn't you/her just call the emergency number your city has? That's incredibly easy to look up, probably a little faster than searching through Twitter.
Or even check the cities website, for that matter.

Idk, to me that's like going to Facebook to call the police. Why would you do that?

American big tech company and the whims of Elon Musk is now directly affecting the safely of your family.

Yeah I don't think this is a great idea guys... :)

You have platforms like signal built on matrix or other forms of communication that is separate from big tech. Mastadon, Lemmy and so on. Consider using those.

Instagram almost works that way. Sometimes you can see a bit of content, but not much, even if you have direct link from friend.

I do not have account - just of the reasons you mentioned - I cannot justify if there's anything interesting for me.

I don't know, it seems to work for Pinterest.

TBF nowadays the move has a certain logic. By keeping your content private you keep it away from search engines and LLMs. Twitter does not rely on search engines to drive traffic to it, and it's a large, already established platform (current efforts to drive it into the ground aside). If any platform should be able to go private, they should.

Mastodon alternative

BlueSky, Mastadon, and now Threads apparently.

🤣

I think it just means that they didn’t make an announcement about it. Usually major changes like this are associated with some sort of announcement, update, changelog etc. so when they’re not, it’s considered to be making a ‘silent’ change.

idk it usually sounds like this https://www.myinstants.com/en/instant/windows-31-startup-tada/

Elon has transitioned all the coders from MX Blue to MX Red just for this change.

Yes, especially since Twitter doesn’t have a PR department any more and thus there wouldn’t even be a way for them to publicly announce anything.

Same. Direct links to tweets seem to work, but going to a user’s page still presents a login page. I’m also not seeing Twitter embeds on sites loading properly.

Same here, can't read anything without logging in.

Yeah, also not working for me. I'll be emailing my local municipality to ask them to use some other platform for sharing news and events, as a matter of accessibility.

Twitter isn't even close to ideal or professional enough to post important updates on.

They did it so silently that it’s not even real.

Yeah I tried to look at some rocket league players tweet about something yesterday and it wouldnt let me so I just left... I don't want a twitter account I just want to view some juicy drama now and again.

Same for me, still only got to the sign in page