I never understood why official goverment body’s do that anyway. Maintaining your own infra means you have full control. This should be mandatory for any government body. Not beeing dependant on big tech who make up silly rules as they please.
Agreed - any competent municipal IT dept. can set up an instance without breaking a sweat - set up a VM, install your OS of choice, install Lemmy & its stack, set up the DB, register the domain, find some interns to moderate & do scut work. Not completely trivial, but within modest means.
i read an article a few weeks ago that said that our (the Netherlands) government is working on its own Mastodon instance, i hope they actually pull through with that :)
Yeah mastodon has come a long way. I hope your govt manages to pull it off just to prove it can be done.
Then I think many others will follow.
It really does make a lot of sense for govts. They have their instance and can then host accounts for all their departments. People from all over the Fediverse can then sub to them for updates.
They have one now at social.overheid.nl which they seem to test at the moment. They have a few accounts such as Belastingdienst, KNMI, Rijkswaterstaat, MinBZK so I hope they’ll continue after the experiment phase is over.
It’s easier to bring the information to the people than it is to bring the people to the information. Social Media is (has previously been…) perfect for that.
Thing is, it made sense until Twitter got sold to a capricious billionaire. Twitter was very stable and their rules didn’t change much before then. The APIs made them an easy way to send out a lot of info in a popular, easily to access way. It worked well as a system for both government agencies and citizens, until Elon decided to stick his dick in it.
But thats exactly the problem :) some ego steps in and boom! As a foreign government you simply cant trust that a privatly owned company has your best interest at heart, and they shouldn’t.
Yep. The BBC & NPR found that out. Notice that the BBC stood up their own Mastodon instance - they know the value of owning one’s house instead of renting.
Japanese local governments, let alone the central one, still have almost zero knowledge about the value of maintaining infrastructure which they should have full control. Virtually even discourses about it do not exist yet. Huge difference between the European governments.
Oh, very much so. There was a big news story about two years ago where a police officer lost a floppy disk that had a bunch of people’s personal information on it.
Yeah, I wish the government would do something. Preferably something that exists today, but I trust they'd want to make their own shitty app. At least then it'd be in one place, I suppose. Emergency alerts on phones are a thing for many people, but not everything is that level of emergency.
They are now relying more on other communication methods such as email, the Line messaging app, their official website, and the L-Alert system, which shares information to media outlets who broadcast it to citizens.
It sounded weird that they'd have reached the 1500 monthly tweet limit so quickly, but apparently there's also a limit of 50 tweets per 24-hour period. In one prefecture that they use as an example, there are 45 cities, towns and villages, and each one needs it's own specific warning. So if a big storm comes through, they'd use up all their daily tweets on the first warning, and there'd be no room for updates. So that's what the issue was.
Makes sense, a bunch of stuff on twitter is broken. We’ve had embedded twitter feeds (most recent 2 or 3 posts) on our work websites for years and they broke that functionality in June. I guess they didn’t want the extra traffic from website embeds?
Eh; I can trigger 429 errors that log me out of the service by just keeping the page open. I’m not sure of anyone is supposed to keep using the service for free in any official capacity.
Coffee is going to become increasingly rare in the coming years. It won't go away completely, but the places that can actually grow it will shift, and a coffee tree takes years of cultivation before it becomes productive. 3-5 years to get your first beans, and then another couple years for full production from that tree.
And as the climate shifts and environments collapse, you'll have to either grow in a greenhouse, which greatly limits supply, or you'll need to be planting new trees in colder areas in the hopes that you'll have a productive run as the Earth warms.
japantimes.co.jp
Oldest