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It should be that way.

My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

Public institutions especially.

There's zero excuse, none.



People don't seem to know about bluesky, the fediverse and the indie web enough.


Public institutions shouldn't be posting on bsky.app or mastodon.social either. The primary source of public communications should be fully hosted on public infrastructure and only then syndicated and/or federated elsewhere.


I agree with the sentiment, but nowadays people don't even know that is even possible, or they just decide it's not worth it because it doesn't get a lot of views, or they think hiring someone technical to manage it is expensive so they just have the secretary of the day do it and that person is very often not technical at all so they only know how to post it on social media


This is one of the reasons why open protocols (like email, http, irc, &c) are so important.


Some people avoid those because they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial. That's why X hasn't disappeared like some of the HN crowd predicted.


I thought HN predicted it would fold due to mismanagement, and arguably it would've if it hadn't been delayed by being rolled into the larger Katamari ball of securities fraud that is SpaceTeslaXAI.

And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.


> And while it hasn't disappeared, it's losing ground to Pinterest.

Is it? I haven't seen a Pinterest link in a while so I guess it depends on what bubble you're in.


If you're not hanging out with a lot of Gen Z women it would explain why it's not on your radar, that's their key demo and they're on a very solid growth trajectory[1].

It's no secret, meanwhile, that twitter has seen steady declines both in daily active users as well as plummeting engagement levels from those that haven't left yet.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/pins-gains...


> consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved ideas that the real world considers non-controversial

What's an example?


Given the fact the comment you replied to is flagged and dead? Apparently even mentioning that some ideas online may not have widespread support offline.


Elon censors people all the time


Who or what is fediverse? How do you think it works?


It's a network of social media sites aka servers that are independently run, and have no algorithm so posts are in chronological order usually. There's several types of sites, each replacing one conventional alternative like mastodon for x/Twitter and Lemmy for reddit.

It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type. To the user, each individual site is as convenient as a conventional social media site such as x/twitter. It aims to combine the advantages of decentralization such as independence, with the advantages of centralization such as a large amount of content

One roadblock is marketing, because the first thing the fediverse sites like mastodon or Lemmy try to do when you search for them on Google is get you into a server. That sounds too technical and is not how the average person uses social media at all. Bluesky fixes this and has an entirely new idea for how the fediverse works.

One downside to the concept of servers is that besides feeling fragmented to the average user compared to bluesky or Instagram, most tend to cater to a specific audience so they filter content for you. It's not like bluesky or Instagram where the user does it entirely from scratch by following accounts (which Instagram ignores anyways)


> It works because the sites belonging to one type can all see the content of other sites of the same type.

That's how it should work but its not how it works in practice because some admin can't stand the idea of opinions contrary to their own existing on the same network. So they deferedate from instances they don't like as well as those instances that don't do the same.


Yes, and? That's how it should work. That's the very point of it, you control your environment as you want. If you don't like someone, remove them. There is no single instance, that's the very point, its conceptually completely absurd to say a set of protocols is "block happy". Why do you feel entitled to other peoples computing real estate? There is no single "Mastodon", go and make your own and connect or don't connect to who you want.


You don't control the environment, some admin does who you cannot get away from without giving up your identity. And even if you self-host its pretty rich to say you control your environment without addressing that the community thinks its acceptable into bullying other instance operators into compliance with their witch hunts.


How is it the protocol's fault if people dislike you? You have literally no right to other peoples computing resources. Nothing in the protocol is stopping you from self hosting an instance. Its not like making another Twitter or Facebook, the software is readymade for you to install. So its frankly absurd to say a technical protocol is block-happy.


I know what this is, I was seeing if whatthesmack understands the concept. He clearly has some deep confusions where he lists Fediverse as among the list of services that are block happy. It does not conceptually make sense to call Fediverse as being block happy anymore than saying http or ssl is block happy.


>they tend to consist entirely of people that support banning non-approved

..meanwhile, X is owned by such a person.


> There's zero excuse, none.

How about the general lack of awareness of "open platforms", or of any given one of your objections to X?

Most people are not in the HN bubble.


An open platform could be as simple as hosting their own website. You don’t need to be in a “bubble” to know about websites.


“As simple as hosting their own website” is contradictory for a majority of the people using the internet.


The context of the thread is public institutions.

I promise you, most public institutions are capable of hosting a web site or running a bluesky account


They choose not to because no one uses them. To get views for political purposes you have to use social media like blue sky and the fediverse


Why should public institutions be trying to get views for political purposes? Isn't that directly contrary to the intended role of public institutions in a democracy?


Because they want to win the next election? Corruption basically.


Bingo. It's not the "institutions" doing it, it's whichever elected officials we're trusting to run it at the time abusing their positions.


We are talking about organizations here who are communicating with the public.


Go ask your mom why she never posts on her own website, but does on closed platform social media. Her answer will be the same as all the people outside of the tech bubble you're in.


My mum used to blog on her own website daily, and she's not tech savvy at all


Who bought the domain for her, and went through the hoops (usually modifying DNS records) to verify it with the blog provider?


I obviously don't know about that person's mom, but a lot of hosting platforms and blog providers will do that for you if you don't want to do it yourself.


Wordpress, I believe


This is not a conversation about mothers. The root of this thread was referring to "accessibility of public-facing government communications."


> My tolerance for people posting to X without also posting to an open platform is over.

> Public institutions especially.

> There's zero excuse, none.

Maybe it wasn't their intent, but they clearly wrote it as a more general statement, with an additional and specific intolerance to public institutions, which is also how others interpreted it.


If it's not the case currently, it should be, that public institutions MUST make their public statements widely available. The old POSSE way seems correct. Blocked, or EULA'd or Paywalled on third-party platforms doesn't do that.




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