Notices by Michael H (michael@theatl.social)

I’m here at the #Georgia 🇺🇸 State Capitol where the Republican members of the State #Elections Board are holding an illegal and unannounced meeting to consider who knows what. The meeting is illegal because it is not being held without the appointed #Democratic board member.

We don’t know what’s on the agenda because the agenda was not posted either.

#Democrats have shown up to bear witness to these shenanigans. (Lots of election deniers are here too 🤬)

I’ll be live posting whatever ensues next! 🎥

#election2024
#Atlanta

Without #Twitter and #X, governments, electeds, and the like have found themselves unable to well, publish critical micro-blog statements to the public.

The tools they used to do that, HootSuite, Metricool, etc, still publish to those platforms, but the platforms themselves aren't designed to prioritize or even care about public safety-related content.

This is, quite frankly, scary. Why should I have to scroll through piles of crap to figure out if I should (or should not) drink the tap water.

What I find brilliant and fascinating about #ActivityPub is its inherent capability to serve as a micro-blogging message protocol that has baked-in redundancy, distributed delivery, and resiliency.

I know that advocating for #ActivityPub to be articulated into a platform for distributing critical safety info is a bit like advocating for the #Linux Desktop 🥹, but seriously, anything can be better than what we have now.

🧵 This weekend, during a crisis, #Atlanta's leaders were, after a bit of a delay, blasting information onto every social media platform they could find, yet found themselves unable to adequately inform the public. Why?

As background, starting on Friday evening, #Atlanta saw cascading failures of its water service yesterday due to broking water main transmission lines. Service is still being restored.

The "NotifyATL" text message alert system was not utilized. Screenshots of press releases with tiny text were posted on Instagram. Critical health and safety info were posted into the void on X/Twitter. Blurry screenshots (instead of KML/SHP/ArcView Online/GeoJSON) of boil water advisories were posted.

And on the other platforms, if the algorithm thought the info was "interesting, " you could view in-between the usual talking animals, videos of car wrecks, and bizarre adverts.

So, what the heck happened?

...continued

Whew - it's been a lot of good convos about #Threads today. Appreciate all the feedback and thoughts from theATL.social's users

Reading all the feedback, and mindful of the potential for future risks, I prefer to err on the side of openness and freedom of expression. Users can choose to block whichever domains they want - I feel very icky doing that for them.

Certainly, if there is a reason for an instance-wide block, I won't ignore that - but baring that, I'd like to stay the course for now.

Usually I don't comment on local news, but having grown up in Cobb County: It is pathetic how the revanchist school board members want so desprately to hold on a shameful past of government-sanctioned hatred against gay people (look up Olympics Out of Cobb).

As a baby gay in high school, gay teachers were silenced, students like me were told we're going to just die of AIDS from thinking about guys, and we had warning stickers in our biology books questioning evolution.

https://www.ajc.com/education/cobb-school-board-votes-to-fire-teacher-who-read-controversial-book/FWNOHTRVJRDRNCTQ6VZE543MD4/

@DemocracySpot Here’s a link to a non-paywalled article from local public radio: https://www.wabe.org/georgia-school-board-fires-teacher-for-reading-a-book-to-students-about-gender-identity/

Unfortunately our local newspaper blocks EU IP addresses due to GDPR keeping them from doing whatever they’re wanting to do.