Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 384 points – Japan prefectures drift away from posting disaster warnings on X
japantimes.co.jp

A growing number of prefectures have stopped posting disaster warnings on the platform due to limits on the number of free posts allowed.

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Imagine posting a hurricane coming your way and the message is:

  • blocked because Musk called it woke propaganda

  • hit the API ceiling and causes a server error

  • blocked since people need to an account and follow Elon first

  • new Twitter update breaks services... For the twelfth time.

  • filtered because the user has seen to many tweets in the past few hours

  • didn't have Twitter Blue/Red/Ultron so the message was supressed

I never understood why official goverment body’s do that anyway. Maintaining your own infra means you have full control. This should be mandatory for any government body. Not beeing dependant on big tech who make up silly rules as they please.

Thing is, it made sense until Twitter got sold to a capricious billionaire. Twitter was very stable and their rules didn’t change much before then. The APIs made them an easy way to send out a lot of info in a popular, easily to access way. It worked well as a system for both government agencies and citizens, until Elon decided to stick his dick in it.

It never made sense. Government should not have favourites in social media. Everything government does should be on an open standard.

But thats exactly the problem :) some ego steps in and boom! As a foreign government you simply cant trust that a privatly owned company has your best interest at heart, and they shouldn’t.

Yep. The BBC & NPR found that out. Notice that the BBC stood up their own Mastodon instance - they know the value of owning one's house instead of renting.

How often do you browse government sites?

It's easier to bring the information to the people than it is to bring the people to the information. Social Media is (has previously been...) perfect for that.

Japanese local governments, let alone the central one, still have almost zero knowledge about the value of maintaining infrastructure which they should have full control. Virtually even discourses about it do not exist yet. Huge difference between the European governments.

The beauty of that is that knowledge can be transferred :) But i suppose they have to be willing first.

Unless the governments would change radically how they see FOSS from a way of reducing money cost…

Right? They’re still using floppy disks and fax machines.

Fax machines are one of the main ways of communications there. I guess floppy disks are indeed partly used at municipal offices yet.

Oh, very much so. There was a big news story about two years ago where a police officer lost a floppy disk that had a bunch of people’s personal information on it.

Japanese local governments, let alone the central one, still have almost zero knowledge about the value of maintaining infrastructure which they should have full control. Virtually even discourses about it do not exist yet. Huge difference from the European governments.

It sounded weird that they'd have reached the 1500 monthly tweet limit so quickly, but apparently there's also a limit of 50 tweets per 24-hour period. In one prefecture that they use as an example, there are 45 cities, towns and villages, and each one needs it's own specific warning. So if a big storm comes through, they'd use up all their daily tweets on the first warning, and there'd be no room for updates. So that's what the issue was.

Makes sense, a bunch of stuff on twitter is broken. We’ve had embedded twitter feeds (most recent 2 or 3 posts) on our work websites for years and they broke that functionality in June. I guess they didn’t want the extra traffic from website embeds?

Eh; I can trigger 429 errors that log me out of the service by just keeping the page open. I'm not sure of anyone is supposed to keep using the service for free in any official capacity.

Did they choose an alternative?

They are now relying more on other communication methods such as email, the Line messaging app, their official website, and the L-Alert system, which shares information to media outlets who broadcast it to citizens.

Mastodon

No, they haven’t. NERV is running its own Mastodon server, but that’s not run by any government agency and is a private company.

The different prefectures are still weighing options.

If I were in charge of disaster warnings, a distributed, redundant system like the Fediverse would seem to be the perfect option for a warning system.

But what do I know...

Ah I see. I hope they consider Mastodon or something similar.

Yeah, I wish the government would do something. Preferably something that exists today, but I trust they'd want to make their own shitty app. At least then it'd be in one place, I suppose. Emergency alerts on phones are a thing for many people, but not everything is that level of emergency.