cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/32283041
As currently they’re only using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
History has shown us time and time again that these corporate platforms are unreliable and untrustworthy.
•Twitter has a moderation problem.
•Facebook has been found interfering with the message delivery of crucial information during emergencies, putting people’s lives at risk.
•YouTube often takes down videos for the wildest of reasons and Google had a massive fight with the federal government over Canadian media outlet compensation. Who’s to say they won’t use their dominant position to sabotage the efforts of governments they don’t agree.
We could email the council requesting that they post on the platform.
They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.
Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.
He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.
Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.
Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.
And time moderating it, especially if they run their own. At least with Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, you get a lot of moderation for free whether you agree with it or not.
And if they use another instance, there’s other liability questions about the particular instance to choose. If they’re gonna represent an official city account, you’d expect some cybersecurity certifications to be a requirement and all kinds of stuff, even if it’s a free service. The instance admins interfering, possibly steering opinions during city elections, etc.
In this case IMO it might even be better to use something like Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin, or alternatives to that. I imagine a city mostly posts announcements and stuff, so a blog that serves as both an official website and you can follow and interact with it from the comfort of your preferred social service sounds a lot more appealing than just another social media without that many users. Can even use more plugins to post to Facebook and Twitter as well, all from one place. Given the age of the board, they’re also more likely to know and care about Threads and Bluesky compatibility just because they have more users, and bureaucratic decisions are based on numbers. A nice graph showing if they join the fediverse they capture all the users fleeing Twitter by supporting AP and AT.
Pitch a micro instance with little more than the rfc2142-like addresses emulated on there - info, mayor, council, admin or chat master, whatever - useful for tagging, forwarding on the way in and info dissemination on the way out.
Much less work to run, since outgoing is all gonna be pre-vetted.