I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

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immibis2 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.

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bpt3 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.

Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.

You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.

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aperrien an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.

	▲	immibis2 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.

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iso1631 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook