One of the things I would miss here on Mastodon was all of the alerts from my local infrastructure and government twitter accounts. These will likely take a very long time to make the migration.
With https://bird.makeup, you can create bot accounts that put those tweets in your Mastodon timeline. For instance, I follow the Washington State Patrol account for regional weather related road closures and accident reports:
EDIT: I Should have tagged the project's creator: @vincent
@awilbert @wspd7pio Could ask WSPD if they have an RSS feed for the content they tweet (it's not in their main website). Government agencies should be using open platform/noncommercial communications methods first before commercial platforms.
Good example why this is necessary: during recent mass shooting at UVA students didn't know whether to trust local police dept. Twitter feed, relied on ad hoc method instead.
@smellythief I don't think US local, state, or federal governments will launch and operate instances to do anything more than host official accounts.
Moderating non-official speech by individuals would violate the First Amendment's prohibition of government regulation of speech even with Sect. 230's protections for hosting entities like ISPs.
@smellythief @smellythief For other countries what you suggest works. But the US doesn't have a national ID and likely won't. We shouldn't have the REAL ID for voting as it is since it is merely another layer of voter suppression.
As for FCC regs: now you're looking at an entirely different kettle of fish because this would mean legislation changing status of internet services to match that of publicly-owned broadcast bandwidth, or telecom which is common carrier.
Adam Wilbert
Femme Malheureuse
smellythief