[logshipper]

I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how its the government's fault for relying on a private service for public communications.

The sentiment, while understandable (and not entirely unfair), assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$. A Twitter account (well, before the Musk takeover anyway) offered:

a) The ability to disseminate information to essentially anyone with a mobile device and an internet connection. b) Low setup costs, maintenance overhead, and technical expertise needed.

As a taxpayer, I would like my government to be cost-effective in resource allocation - Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way to maintain a 1-->many communications infrastructure. That said, I fully agree that they should explore alternatives in light of Musk's antics.

It is important to also remember that government can be slow when it comes to embracing tech. ActivityPub is only 5 years old, and that's a short-time by govt standards, RSS is effectively (and quite sadly) dead for the everyday folk. This may or may not surprise the readership here, but Ontario's healthcare system still uses faxes to transmit patient records: https://www.dww.com/articles/ontario-government-to-eliminate....

[ghusto]

> assumes that the government has armies of technical folks available to maintain ActivityPub/RSS/$RandomHarryPotterSpell$.

Sadly this will never be the case, but it should (and absolutely can) be.

I worked on a large government project, and learnt that what they generally do is outsource to the worst bidder. There's so much bureaucracy that accountability disappears. This means that as long as all the boxes (on all the millions of TPS reports) are ticked, company X gets the contract.

Bear in mind company X isn't the best, not even the cheapest (far from it), but they're the best at getting government contracts because they know how the game is played.

Now the government's overspent, under-delivered, and still nobody's accountable for the complete disaster of a project. I wish I could give you exact details on what I'm talking about.

An alternative is just hiring good engineers, but that would introduce accountability, and nobody in government wants that.

[dogman144]

You’ve got to wonder how governments executed emergency communications from, say, 1800 until 2006-ish. The secret is they did, and there’s ways to do it still.

Cost-effective resource allocation is one part of government but if you think that’s all there is to risk management in the public sector you’ve been mainlining “govt as Corp” Thiel views and forgotten risk management overall, part of which is disaster recovery, failovers, high availability, no single points of failure, all of it. Using pre-Musk twitter had these same drawbacks too.

The moment a bunch of heads of state got account takeovered in 2019-ish should have been the wake-up call.

[mxuribe]

It is the gov's fault for relying on a service...that lacked a formal legal agreement that favors the gov, and even better that favors the citizens who pay taxes to said gov. But, i am not going to fault the gov folks too much, because hey they're human, and also because i'm pretty sure that the gov's intent (in deciding to use mechanisms like twitter) were not evil, quite the contrary no doubt. I fault such governments not because they're thinking evil, but rather poor decision-making. Also, you make a valid point that gov entities often lack enough tech personnel...However, i feel gov entities should at least have some small numbers of tech personnel who - not only install hardware, software - but advise governments on what technologies could fit the very specific needs of the citizens. Corporations for years/decades have technology advisors on staff; basically IT/tech/digital folks who don't go anywhere near software/hardware, and instead advise corporate entities on leveraging the most appropriate tech solutions for whatever scenarios come up for said corpporations. What any gov should always ask themselves in cases of deciding for platforms for emergency use: what mechanisms do we need in place that will scale to provide the service (emergency comms and/or broadcast) that our citizens need, etc..

To your point about having gov. be cost-effective, i fully agree with you! While i happily (yes, happily!) pay my taxes when gov uses them to good use (because it helps everyone in the long-term even if they dont realize it), i dislike poor decision-making by govs when they waste my tax dollars. So, i think the issue is not so much that govs can not afford to make long-term proper decisions of choosing scalable, appropriate tech platforms...but rather, that many govs simply make poor choices, or don't know how to make a choice, and then rely on ther wrong people to help make bad choices.

As the point about faxes...the U.S. also relies on fax as the approved "private" communcation system within healthcare...Not because gov doesn't move fast enough nor because someone made a bad tech decisioin...but we use faxes in american healthcare because someone made a bad tech decision AND THEN proceeded to explicityl cement that decision into law!

Overall, i blame gov, but not too roughly...but i also blame our gov/political leaders for not thinking properly long-term, and often relying too much on private entities...entities who do not always have the same incentives alignbed with citizens. Ok, ok, i'm off my soap box now. Thanks for your patience! :-)

[niam]

The goal of govt here is to reach the breadth of it's audience. To that end: it takes some really unproven assumptions to assert that they coulda done better than publishing where people already are. A "scalable appropriate tech platform" is nice but the point here is that there's a significant number of people who will use the funny bird app but not whatever other channels you establish, no matter how wonderful they are.

[cmrdporcupine]

The provincial and federal gov'ts all sorts of online services fairly effectively. e.g. CRA's isn't awful, even if rudimentary -- it beats what I hear the IRS offers to Americans. They have hosted services all over the place and infrastructure to host. And there are, surprisingly, actually reasonably talented people inside the public sector that could run a Mastodon instance and publicize it.

But direction to manage such services needs to come from the gov't and the public generally. And it's indicative of a loss of a public-sector / public-service ethic generally -- especially in North America -- that that never happens.

The worst problems as I have seen them it is when the government outsources these things, puts out RFPs and the lowest cost bidder, or best connected bidder, wins and produces garbage. I've been privy to that process (homeless shelter management system / case management system for the City of Toronto) and it was depressing as hell.

The EU and various European countries have already made moves into the fediverse. But this concept of offering services like this has seemingly become foreign in North America, where privatization and private public partnerships are the order of the day and people just assume that anything done by the public sector is going to be expensively run garbage.

[err4nt]

Just as an example of how simple it could be - a WordPress install would get them an easy way to manage content on a website with different users and publishing permissions (so it can integrate into their human organization in a useful way) and should work not only to display information on the website, but to provide a search on that site, and you get things like RSS feeds for free. Hosting WordPress isn't free, but it is relatively straightforward and affordable.

Not saying that WordPress is the best solution, but I think over 45% of websites online use it, so toss a coin and it's probably a WordPress site. It should be very easy to find people who are familiar with it or can help work on it if that's ever needed.

A solution like that is small and simple enough for even a municipal government, but scalable enough that it could work for a national, or even international level organization too. I think something like this would be a prudent way to publish important information online.

[earleybird]

TranBC is a wordpress site. DriveBC is four bare metal hosts that have a baseline nic load of around 1 Mbyte continuous. On 'snow days' it goes up two orders of magnitude - yes, close to saturating single gb nics on each host. We followed a mantra of "publish to static; static is king".

[grecy]

> Pre-Musk Twitter was one such cost-effective way

But with absolutely no continuity or performance guarantees, and answering to absolutely nobody.

Twitter (pre or post Musk) and any social network are companies that do whatever the hell they want whenever they wants. They answer to nobody, and nobody should rely on them to do anything of importance. Sure you can share cat photos with your family, but don't do anything that actually matters.

Maybe the service is down for a day = tough.

Maybe they charge you to post on their service = nothing you can do.

Maybe they charge people to read posts on the service = nothing you can do.

Maybe they flip the whole script and delete everything and do something totally different = tough.

Government relying on such flaky mechanisms to disseminate critical information to citizens is the problem here.

[seydor]

They have public TV and radio. those were not easy tech when it started. It's just a matter of will (and a consequence of geriatric leadership everywhere)

[riffic]

> ActivityPub is only 5 years old

quibble, but the Fediverse is 15 years old (https://fediverse.party/en/post/fediverse-14-years-in-2022/)