🆕 blog! “How do you decentralise emergency alerts?”
Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and forget about …
@Edent Masto makes it harder to find these updates, but once you're following the alert account, you get alerts reliably, correct? It's just a problem if the "single source of truth" is published only on Masto like it is on Twitter.
#posse solves this - if the alert sites post mainly to a blog with an RSS feed, users can find (or make) a Masto account to follow it.
Still doesn't solve the discoverability issue you're trying to solve, but seems workable, no?
@tedcurran yes, once you follow - you're good.
But you need to follow the official account.
If a 3rd party has built a bot using an RSS feed, they can post fake alerts, or suppress alerts.
@Edent One issue with just using lat/lng/haversine is defining the area something applies to is often more complicated.
eg "River Calder flooding" wants to go to specific places like Hebden Bridge, Todmorden, Mytholmroyd
eg "Good chance of northen lights in Scotland and North England tonight" is a massive area
@Edent it’s a difficult one. It was good that we have (had?) a place where you know you can publish and the audience is there and can find you (remember me asking about how safe “search online for…?” actually is? This is a use case where someone will search for…, for good or bad)
But then we’re relying on that place being there and not being taken over and set alight
I’m hoping that mastodon becomes the short text replacement. I fear it won’t. Maybe I’m old and everyone uses TikTok now instead
@Edent Regarding discoverability, if profiles could have a similar location property you could search for “bot accounts in my vicinity” which would offer up applicable services.
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