I have a long commute in and out of a large city. Since I spend so much time on the road, I always try to get the details of Amber Alert notifications to be on the lookout for vehicles used in abductions. I guess I can’t do that anymore since Twitter requires an account to see Amber Alerts. Hopefully my state finds another platform to post them.
I’ve been constantly amazed at how normalized it’s gotten for not only other companies, but for governments, to rely so much on sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc, for essential information like Amber Alerts. Shit like this hopefully makes people more aware of how treacherous it is to rely on corporate services for public services. Maybe the gov will finally institute their own web services for public information (unlikely) or at least enact boundaries on services that have been widely adopted (slight more likely).
The data secure officer of our goverment has build a mastodon server and some official post there. I think more countries should do that. So they don’t have to rely on something like Twitter or Facebook. They could do that to reach more people, but with a mastodon instace they could be independent from companies