#Twitter going rogue has much deeper implications than the Musk saga with all of its daily bullshit.

Let's not forget that, before the buffoon oligarch took over, Twitter used to be a place where government and scientific entities used to post (and they still post) information that may be crucial for the population. Twitter used to be the primary place for announcements about earthquakes, eruptions, pandemics, tsunamis, weather alerts, shootings etc.

How does that cope with a reality where external APIs are basically shut down, their unofficial frontend API is no longer working either, viewing is only possible through registered accounts, and even those accounts have a cap on the number of posts that they can consume?

How can a service with such heavy constraints around monetization still be considered a viable way of delivering messages that matter for the whole population?

As an example, one of the few Twitter accounts that I still follow (mirrored on the Fedi) is the one of INGV - the Italian Institute for geology and vulcanology.

I've got my good reasons, as I was born in a city (Naples) that may be soon blown up by the eruption of the largest European supervolcano (Campi Flegrei).

As my parents and relatives are now sitting just 1-2 km above several square km of magma, I obviously follow any updates that the INGV Twitter account posts about earthquakes in the area, with an automated system of alerts in place.

How does that cope with a service that lets users see only a few hundreds of tweets per day, and where you need bullshit like being registered, verified etc. to reliably access the content?

Can you imagine a tsunami alert system in Japan that alerts only those who paid for a platinum alert subscription, and only if they haven't already consumed their budget of 5 yearly alerts?

Twitter must be abandoned RIGHT NOW by any institutional accounts that post stuff that can make the difference between life and death of people.

@blacklight There were ways for public emergency information to get out before Twitter and there will be ways after. At a minimum, things like earthquake/tsunami/flood monitoring sites should have some RSS or other feed that you can subscribe to, or an API for use by an app, without Musk being a gatekeeper.

@bob I was indeed still using RSS for most of my alert feeds - but they just happened to point at Twitter (through my Nitter bridge), because all the alert channels were there.

Of course you can configure alerts on RSS feeds, but that requires technical knowledge - plus a lot of filtering to figure out if an alert impacts the area where you actually are.

An alerting system must be idiot-proof and work out of the box when you buy a smartphone - I think that the Dutch NL-Alert system is a good example for it. It's also used by 94% of the population.

Twitter was never supposed to be the place for public alerting systems, but it was basically open to everyone until Musk took over, so people started considering it like a public service and forgot that was a private for-profit business.

And solutions like alerts based on RSS feeds can be very powerful, but you're unlikely to achieve a >90% population coverage with it.