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It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration).

I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.

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There's no way France have no clause in its law everywhere that can be creatively interpreted to be used for that purpose. But that won't get enforced unless there will be a better option than Twitter that average Paris Metro employees understand; they would not be dumb, but they would not care. Average people today can barely grasp the concept of a password.
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Surely it shouldn't be to difficult to come up with a sort of plugin-type approach like I've seen in various 'comments' sections on existing websites:

Simply embed the 'update' feed on a page in the existing website and have some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates.

I guess because even this would not be 'free', twitter ends up winning.

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> some kind of admin panel where employees can easily CRUD some updates

In my experience this is usually the crux. That software always rots, and needs whatever (minimal) on-ramping for employees, as well as access management.

If I could wave a wand at those solutions I'd stop fighting the user and let them post to Twitter or wherever, and just have a public facing page pull those posts as updates for consumers outside of whatever walled garden they originate from.

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Or they already have that, but it's badly designed, bloated, or doesn't have employees assigned to it.
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> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website

Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.

So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.

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I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.

A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.

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More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...
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I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
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as much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
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As long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read.

That said, RSS seems way simpler.

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A mastodon account provides an rss feed by default so both solutions coexist without duplicating the work.
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RSS and IRC need new apps and new means to self host. To do that, there probably has to be new DNS.
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I don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together?

RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.

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Pretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
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X is a public site. Anyone is free to make an account.
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I strongly reject that I should be required to create an account in order to read updates about local train service.
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It's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?
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Doesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?
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It's the one I use the most, but in my experience it's lagging behind the Twitter accounts. It's also noisy because it puts last-minute outages at the same level as minor month-long schedule change (which can't be dismissed), so some lines (eg. line R) are almost always displayed as having issues.
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This app is just garbage. Can't even use it if you are rooted.
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For me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.
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Ok but can you answer my question about reliability?
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I don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.
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But who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know.

Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?

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The information may be as reliable, but:

1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size.

2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.

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Wow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here
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Twitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor.

Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...

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Twitter won by pulling the rug!

They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.

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Except that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.
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Usability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide
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The funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.
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