solarbird | still about twitter, but about terrible management, not fascism

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Twitter used to be a really good and important tool for disaster management, before it was a disaster itself. This isn’t necessarily as well known outside of certain subsectors of twitter users, but it genuinely was important – not to gawkers, but actual emergency-management and disaster-response professionals.

That’s gone now, and it’s a real loss. Mastodon’s federation model is great in many, many ways but not in this one, and it could be a real hindrance to forming any replacement. This kind of large-realtime-data scenario is one of the relatively-few actual strengths of the monolithic model, and while I don’t think keeping it is worth the trade of also creating an endless massive alt-right/neo-fascist disinformation and propaganda fountain, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t a strength – and of value.

In short, RIP disaster-response twitter. You were good. You were very, very good.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dewline

I'm sure that the Fediverse system can work up an improvement upon what disaster-response networking on Twitter's been capable of. The work on that is almost certainly in progress now. I don't know what form it will take.

From:

solarbird

I'm not, but I'd obviously prefer you end up being correct.

From:

rialian

Honestly, that was likely the most important thing of Twitter, and I am really not sure how we will replace that functionality. Especially since Elon has completely destroyed the organic growth of it.

From:

solarbird

It's not even the scale - it's the intervention to rank paid above everything else, combined with the injection of propaganda and disinfo. It's useless now.