People were interested in what it looked like so this is from my phone.
This is why governments should use public infrastructure for public services.
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Soon when Trump begins his ~~reign~~ I mean dictatorship both Truthsocial and Twitter will be platforms for government announcements.
I wish the federal government had a software team that made open source software that could be used by all the states.
Imagine if there was a free and open source self hosted alternative to twitter that federated with other social networks...
I wonder what their downtime would be. I hope they'd host it on rented servers just for that reason
Surely there are plenty of people who could be hired to make that not an issue? The same argument could be used for other government services. In the UK you do a lot of things through gov.uk. we also had a vaccine passport system as well which is arguably more important than a mastodon instance.
I'm sure you could, but with this being American government we're talking about, I'm not sure they ever would.
Germany is/was trying something kind of like this? I don't know much about it but here's a link in case you want to try reading into it a bit more.
USDS
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Can you imagine a mastodon.whitehouse.gov instance and everyone in the world just defederates with it every time a republican gets inaugerated?
It would be an absolute shithole with almost 0 moderation due to 1a applicability. Defederation would happen regardless of who has gov majority.
Just don't allow random people to make accounts
I can, but it would still be effective for public announcements because Mastodon does not typically require a login to view on the web, and it provides am RSS feed. Walled garden platforms that won't show posts to anonymous web visitors are not acceptable for public announcements.
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Using an url shortener smells like phishing
Yeh, I can't believe an emergency service (which I would consider a government agency) is using a URL shortener.
No wonder scammers also use URL shorteners. People get desensitized to what they are doing, masking the actual URL
I would think they could have a legit .gov url shortener. They're not much code and easy enough to run at scale.
I'd vote for u.gov.
oi.guv
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Missouri does the same. I haven’t been able to see Emergency Alerts since quitting Twitter
The dumb thing is they can fit quite a bit of text in the alert itself. They don't need to link to anything to provide the relevant info necessary to spot potential suspects or the description of the child.
Every time I've gotten an Amber Alert on my phone, the phone screams the description of the kid & the suspected car & possibly the suspect themselves on top of showing the entire message on the screen. No idea why anywhere would put all of that info onto Twitter only when this system already exists & really grabs your attention.
Absolutely.
And no one is gonna bother clicking on that link so they pretty much made it useless
...and then it wants you to make an account, right? :)
yep! dumb.
Yah, I've been yelling loudly about this shit for a decade. Nobody cares, especially not the people in the government who can't be bothered to use their own websites.
I turned off alerts for this reason. It's always a twit or FB link. I don't have either so I can't see the info.
Just a taste of the deepening US oligarchy, as more public services are gutted in the favour of corpo interests.
Just put the info IN THE ALERT?
These marketing strategies to get people back on Twitter are getting out of hand!
If this isn't the correct community please let me know. I'm not sure where to post to be honest but it is a picture I suppose.
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That's just an amber alert with extra steps
This kind of crap, and the fact that I can't force the sounds to respect DND in my country, are why I turned off Amber Alerts on my phone through adb (or "hacking", to the layperson).
You need to use adb for that? I simply have a setting to disable them.
I have that setting, but it doesn't work in my country.
For some stupid reason, they've decided to send every time of warning message at the "Presidential Level" that's supposed to be reserved for crazy life or death kind of stuff.
The settings are in my phone, but can't actually do anything to the messages coming in.
So I disabled the entire system from my phone and downloaded an app that gives me alerts. Now I'm getting weather alerts again. Haven't had the opportunity to test whether it'll alert me to emergencies yet, thankfully. But I've turned off Amber Alerts in the app.
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Nixel's system is great for SF and up North. I assumed the whole state used it
Jeez! I had one in MI a few months ago where the image of the abductee was a Bookface link you couldn't view unless you were signed in. Just ridiculous.
Now I understand. I was confused about why people were going to Xhitter for Amber alerts. Looks like California is the issue for pointing people there in the Amber alert that goes out to phones.
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