shoshele (she/they)
Caroline Orr BuenoI spoke to TIME magazine about the vital role that Twitter plays in crisis- and disaster-related communication — serving as a hub for firsthand witness/survivor accounts, news gathering, emergency alerts & guidance, real-time updates on closures & safe passageways, direct contact with emergency services, etc — and how catastrophic it would be to lose this, especially since we have nothing to take its place yet.
Danie van der Merwe@rvawonk but hashtags etc work as well on Mastodon...
RDS (shawphd on Twitter)
Lisa 4 Social Justice
Nisa (she/her) 
@rvawonk What do you think of TikTok? TikTok is starting to bulk up their search feature and have noticed similarly how events quickly spread. Downside is that sometimes content is unverified and/or very graphic and there’s little to prevent seeing it on your feed.
Dustin McCartney@nisadani @rvawonk yes...but TikTok is also under growing scrutiny due it's relationship with state actors; at least here in the U.S... and some in the FCC are discussing banning it: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/tech/fcc-commissioner-tiktok-ban/index.html
Mike Taylor 🦕@rvawonk I don't get it. You are writing "There is nothing to take Twitter's place" *on Mastodon*, which is taking Twitter's place.
@mike it’s not, though. It’s trying to provide a refuge but it’s absolutely not a replacement for Twitter nor was it ever meant to be.
@rvawonk Well, I think that is a bit disingenous. I absolutely get that it's not intended to be a one-for-one replacement (and thank goodness!) -- but at the same time, I highly doubt it would ever have been created had it not had Twitter as a model.
@mike oh sure, it’s inspired by certain elements of Twitter. That’s definitely true. But it’s not meant to take Twitter’s place, and that means a huge vacuum will open up if and when Twitter goes down.
@rvawonk Maaaybe. I rather think that the rational discussion has mostly moved here already. Everyone who's left there, fighting over the eyeballs like rats in a ditch fighting over a piece of courgette ... Well, I don't much care where they go. 4chan? Truth Social? Whatevs.
Heikki Wilenius
Grant Jacobs BioinfoTools NZ
Aaron ForceI never thought about this but you are absolutely right. 😬
Aris Teon@rvawonk Mastodon can absolutely replace Twitter, the only question is whether people want to replace it or not.
Nelleellen@rvawonk Rather prescient of you, given today’s events…
Leopard on Parade@rvawonk Thank you. That is what worries me so much if Twitter goes down.
Craig Ceecee@rvawonk Excellent analysis. It's hard to replace Twitter, as much as we want to. I agree it will take a long time to replace it. Other social media sites don't have the quick finds and quick responses.
@rvawonk I think what’s challenging is that it’s not just a platform but a set of norms about how information is presented and shared. Like, for similar dissemination of real time information to work here, people would have to learn to add and search using hashtags.
Chili@rvawonk all of those emergency services and official government accounts must add their entities to mastodon.
Aethylred@NotJustDNA @rvawonk you can follow a hashtag on Mastodon and it gathers up all the messages across all the federated instances.
DJP (Darren John Pope)@rvawonk ... re emergency/disaster reporting etc - there is always local radio and legacy media - yes, I know, very 20th century but I actually think big social media such as Twitter suffer from an inflated sense of self importance - in reality, the world won't stop turning without Twitter et al. and journalists and citizen networks will have to go back to good old fashioned leg work (IMO)
@GreenCarnation2 well, but if the disaster is bad enough, local radio and TV studios can be affected, too. And by affected, I mean destroyed. It has happened on a number of occasions.
@rvawonk ... and yet for centuries information networks served the need and often times during the most extreme crises such as world wars. I'm the first to applaud the wonder and conveniences of social media platforms but I do think there's an element of inflated importance at play here, usually peddled by those with skin in the game. That decentralized alternatives such as Mastodon are expanding with the demise of Twitter, tells us there is always the means for localised communication.
@rvawonk ... Interestingly, the shape of federated social media is not unlike the radio and print media network model of the twentieth century
Thornbill9@GreenCarnation2 @rvawonk for centuries? People took years to know what happened a few miles from their house never mind continents away. With so many news outlets under paywalls, local media under hedge fund austerity, cable networks filled with empty punditry, twitter was the one place where you could cut through the middleman and access true experts telling you what the corporate media didn’t want to tell you. Ancestral mastodon is obsessed with resentment of blue check status war, like Elmo
MacArthur Park@rvawonk Twitter was completely global and use from Buckingham Palace to the back blocks of Tasmania and the Appalachian Mountains. This is what made it so wonderful.
@rvawonk I am mourning.. in serious grief.. for the beautiful tribe of compassionate souls, other ‘broken’ humans I connected with there.. they literally saved my life on more than one occasion.. #RIPtwitterLifeline