I’m seeing folks from #Sudan on #twitter despairing that the site’s new limits, and its general m*sk-era brokenness, will compromise their ability to stay updated on the catastrophe unfolding in their homeland and share emergency info.
Once more: mastodon/fediverse needs to think seriously about how to expand to users in Asia and Africa and how to handle emergencies #twitterdown
An infuriating story about how Musk’s changes to Twitter—restricting API access, gutting the engineering team + more—throttled disaster response in the #turkey #syria #earthquake. https://time.com/6254500/turkey-earthquake-twitter-musk-rescue/ Mastodon + fediverse need to expand beyond northern Europe and the Anglophone world, and consider what emergency response on this platform would look like; the lives of people in Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. can’t be reliant on a billionaire’s whims
Good question! I don’t know, because I’ve never run a social network before—but I do know that who uses it and what they’re able to use it for are the result of deliberate decisions. It’s not an accident that masto is overwhelmingly anglophone and/or Northern European, or that discoverability is low even in an emergency
I listened earlier today to a Twitter space in which a Nigerian journalist said he’d attempted and failed to use Mastodon https://mstdn.social/@robotman/110641275799783143
Arbella Bet-Shlimon
Parade O’ Crap™