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.
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.
It’s going to take a long time but ultimately one can only hope for a more balanced world.
Question is, will Westerners manage to keep their democratic values such as individual liberty, the rule of law and the protection of minorities in a world where theocracies and fascist states have more power?
Sure thing. Germany, UK and Italia waking up every morning trying to figure out how to have more unfaithful spouses stoned, more blasphemers beheaded and more women hidden under fabric bags
Iran was quite progressive before the US intervened to secure oil.
Syria had a strong left wing separatist movement before the US intervened and repeatedly betrayed them.
The extremist right theocrats in Afghanistan were kept safe during the war and reinstated (but the moderates and extremist left wing are dead).
Ethiopia, Sudan same story.
The Saudi Arabian and Israeli theocrats are allies of the west. The west supports the genocide Israel’s ultra-conservative government is performing.
Niger has been destabilized by france for decades to keep them from controlling their energy resources. Just because what russia is going to do is worse, doesn’t mean the existing corruption (and thus the ability for russia to trigger the coup) wasn’t the direct result of western imperialism.
It is publicly stated policy of the fascist evangelicals in the US to spread homophobia and hate via “charities”.
At every turn, anyone outside the imperial core with resources has the most corrupt and theocratic element assisted by the west. The US brings the opposite of democracy or progressivism, and there are many countries in europe that are just as bad.
And that’s not to mention the growing fascist movements in the UK and Italy who would love to go back to stoning women.
Clearly you have an altered perception of reality or an agenda to point Western democracies as the villain in the story.
I am not denying the fact that Western countries have initiated and supported some dictatorships that would align with their interests. But these regimes are light years away from fascism and theocracy. You can not in good faith compare military dictators in the Sahel with de jure theocracies like Afghanistan and Iran.
Unless you want to prove that every regime is corrupt and that democracy is no better than dictatorships.
Also, the fact that these democracies are struggling peacefully with inner extremists without falling into outright dictatorship like China and Russia is enough to prove that yes, they are better.
You are just stating alternative fact to support your narrative.
War is profitable. We need to make war less profitable. Then grievances will be solved by other means. Destroying the Western imperialist system will go a long way to making that a reality.
Russia is the 2nd biggest weapons dealer in the world, China is the 4th, so for me that “Western imperialist system” part is hollow. We cannot bring down every large government of the world and simultaneously solve every tribal grievance.
Your standards are off. Weapons dealer is not the standard. The West dominated 80% of the world’s entire population. The standard is not weapon sales it’s using war to expand and fund with global western order
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