Technology

This is part of the fall of Twitter.

There were two paths for Twitter, in the eyes of many idealistic people like me. One path was something terrible like what happened with Musk. The second path was one that treated it as a public commons of the world.

That second path is how many grew to understand Twitter during its rise and peak. This is why there are so many situations where various public and governmental groups used it as a notification feed/system.

You can go on about how they should just start their own ActivityPub based solution, or move to bluesky or whatever. But it’s not that simple for all of them. Nor are all of the groups involved in posting these feeds technically savvy to do so. Twitter made it easy, and it made sense.

The article could have easily been just as absurd if it was about how people didn’t get the alert because the alerts were moved to a mastodon instance and people are upset because they don’t want to have to go through the trouble of picking a server. heh.

It’s so unfortunate that Twitter went this way. No more free and easy api, no more third party apps and tools. No more expectation that everyone is there. No more expectation that public alerts make sense there.

Yes, centralizing all of this is a big problem. And musk is just one example of why. But, it could have gone the other way.