Video download link | md5sum 1f73039f2b3c45e5286983423b16ee1c Twitter and the Public Domain Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: There's a catastrophe in the making; not only do many public institutions and public servants lose audiences as Twitter stagnates; we're about to lose a lot of history and there are no fallback plans in place (for archival)

TWITTER more or less died on the last day of June, as we noted yesterday (and in IRC days prior). Basically, the walled gardens did huge damage because people who lurked in Twitter (e.g. for weather updates, emergencies and so on) could no longer access anything. This went on for about a week and then the rivals emerged even stronger (Facebook quickly overran the hype/buzz around Bluesky and Mastodon). Longtime Twitter users looked for alternatives. Many ended up in Facebook/Instagram ("Meta"), which isn't a positive development at all. Registering a domain in their national top-level domain (TLD) space or even international namespace isn't so expensive. Hosting can even be done with a single-board computer from one's home network, especially owing to the speeds of today's residential connections.

In any event, the video above explains what the death of Twitter will mean to public institutions and politicians. A lot of history will get deleted and many people are still unable to access public information without going through Fraud Musk. "One can hope that the end of Twitter is forthcoming shortly," one person told me. "Many countries have been misusing Twitter in place of channels of official communications. Yet some of the very same countries also have a constitutional obligation to archive official notices and communications. Twitter fails on that ground."

"Longtime Twitter users looked for alternatives. Many ended up in Facebook/Instagram ("Meta"), which isn't a positive development at all."Some public services are already scrutinised severely for this. As one person put it, "the [Dutch] fire brigade used Twitter for warning people about fires until that stopped working and now they have a mastodon instance [...] apparently they do have some posts on it (in Dutch)..."

Keep Twitter out of nations and governments; better yet, keep Twitter out of society in general. All this chaos was inevitable, it was only a matter of time. Twitter was never a viable company and without government subsidies (de facto bailout) Tesla is also a pile of junk. Tesla's stock fell 65% in 2022, the same year Musk bought (and had been looking to buy, then reverted back to changing his mind) Twitter. ⬆