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461 points GavinAnderegg | 11 comments | | HN request time: 0.892s | source | bottom
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llm_nerd ◴[] No.42150659[source]
Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

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jtbayly ◴[] No.42150873[source]
One of the interesting benefits of Twitter splintering into multiple shards is that this problem becomes more clear. As Twitter alternatives have grown more relevant, there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department. Should we move to Bluesky? Threads? Mastodon? Stay on Twitter? Somehow publish to all of the above?

I’m hoping it will lead to something more like RSS, but that may be wishful thinking.

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1. Terr_ ◴[] No.42151682[source]
> there is no obvious single place to do this anymore as, say, a police department.

Their website! Now get off my lawn! :p

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2. ◴[] No.42151881[source]
3. hiatus ◴[] No.42151945[source]
But then you need to go to each website for updates. The benefit of these platforms was aggregation.
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4. XorNot ◴[] No.42151982[source]
They're a government department. This is literally something which should be coordinated by the government.

I.e. police.gov should just dashboard this for you using location services.

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5. homebrewer ◴[] No.42152080[source]
This was solved 20 years ago with RSS, I guess it's about time for someone to rediscover the idea and reimplement something like it, push it like a great new invention, and make a couple of billions in the process.
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6. johnnyanmac ◴[] No.42152081[source]
I feel like that's fine, as another boomer. The internet wasn't designed with this idea that you only visit 10 websites and everything else is on the fringes. Did people forget that bookmarks exist?

Back to crushing reality, that's also why I'm a huge RSS fan. your feed should be based on websites you want to follow, not what the website's algorithms want you to follow. RSS puts the control back to the user while giving 95% of the convinience of a centralized platform.

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7. johnnyanmac ◴[] No.42152112{3}[source]
It was solved 20 years ago. But companies unsolved it by deciding to de-prioritize or even remove such RSS API's.

Getting around that requires some heavy and expensive scraping (compared to a lightweight API to hook into), and as we're seeing right now companies are at each other's necks in real time over scraping.

8. PhasmaFelis ◴[] No.42152131{3}[source]
Good point. If Discord can make billions by essentially reinventing IRC...
9. blitzar ◴[] No.42155544{3}[source]
God I loved rss - my list was / is everything from breaking news headlines to random interesting peoples blogs.
10. hiatus ◴[] No.42156742{3}[source]
If setting it up was as easy as posting a tweet, sure. My parents don't even know what RSS is but they have heard of Twitter.
11. hiatus ◴[] No.42156751{3}[source]
Policing in the US is fragmented. Unlike many European countries, the local police are not nationalized—each department has its own concerns, budget, etc.