They control the primary forum for local community chat, they control the swap-meet (facebook marketplace); I have no access to any of that anymore, it used to take place on many other forums, but it has centralized on facebook, which I don't use. A fair few local orgs use facebook exclusively for communication. Some of them have public pages, some don't.
I don't really care, aside from missing the odd deal on the marketplace that I can't participate in, but I imagine this could be quite important to other people. There's got to be a better way, but I don't know what it is or how to get there.
Very much so. For the past 10 years, facebook has more or less dominated the market for everything related to rural places and smaller towns.
This could very well be a geographical thing - but where I'm from, Norway, FB is the de facto platform for anything social in communities. I've heard that in other places of the world, people used WhatsApp, Discord, etc. - but where I'm from, it's FB.
Local classifieds, local hobby groups, local community information, local sports, culture events, etc.
Luckily there seems to be a push in moving people elsewhere - but with all the older folks primarily using FB, it's going to be hard. I think it's just fine for things like hobbies, classifieds, and such - but real infrastructure shouldn't use FB as their main platform for sharing information.
Remember that WhatsApp is also Facebook. As for Discord... isn't it a gamer thing?
> I think it's just fine for things like hobbies, classifieds, and such
No, that's the point. If it's used for all of this stuff, then people "have" to be on it. Group interaction media _is_ part of the "infrastructure" of society.
Discord pretty much replaced IRC. I remember, 20 years ago, a lot of people used IRC for chat. I think SoMe and the various chat apps more or less killed off IRC as a popular platform...then discord came along, and filled the niche for gaming chatroom. Now people use it for all kinds of stuff.
Real question: Is it possible to be banned from WhatsApp? I don't use social media networks at all (except LinkedIn for strictly professional topics). If I was banned from WhatsApp, or Line, or any other pervasive chat network, it would really hurt.
> A fair few local orgs use facebook exclusively for communication.
I noticed that when vaccine availability in the US was constrained during the first few months of 2021 and local governments were organizing vaccination clinics, several of the events were announced only on Facebook pages. Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
It was scary to think that folks locked out of Facebook for whatever reason did not have access to those notices unless informed by a friend or family member.
> Several towns/counties didn't seem to have websites, or didn't put the events on the ones they had, instead preferring to announce them on Facebook.
Yeah, no government agency should publish anything (however trivial) exclusively over a private platform. As far as I'm concerned it should be illegal and anything they do post on social media should always be a mirror of the same content posted to a public platform and retained according to the laws that agency should follow for their documents.
People should never have to worry about a private company being a barrier between them and their own government, and no private company should have the ability to pick and choose who can view what the government publishes, or to secretly modify that content (perhaps selectively), or to remove content that should stay part of public record.
I don't think that really solves it, though; they just have to have someone in the office go to all the Facebook posts of the notifications, print them out, and snail mail them to you. Possibly time-consuming and therefore expensive, but FOIA-compliant.
Does it makes sense to push for representatives to discuss a law to forbid a city or state announcements to use any commercial platform for announcements?
I think it makes more sense to mandate they post on a govt-funded platform simultaneously with any other media.
More media (Facebook etc) means reaching more people, that's not a bad thing, but it IS a bad thing for everyone else to get the info late if the govt only updates their "official" site once a week or something, but updates twitter every few minutes.
The hilarious thing is that any mention of a public utility supplied social networking site would be met with STATE CONTROL!!!1 GUBBMINT SURVEYLANCE!!1
The sad thing with that, is that a state developed app certainly would have backdoors for police build in by design. And all the ither nice features people in power would like to have.
So I am hoping for/dreaming of an international developed open source solution. But the existing ones I am aware of are unlikely to ever fill that role.
First, I gotta say "GUBBMINT SURVEYLANCE" really made me laugh. I am a bit sad to see it downvoted, but here is not Reddit, so I understand.
That said, reading so many good, thoughtful posts here... and then one more from you(!)... it made me think: Why isn't there a global "goverment/non-profit facebook"? Think: Strictly open source software. Hosted in "the cloud". Gov'ts can do: (1) on-prem, (2) public cloud (AWS/Azure/G), but they control the env, or (3) pay for a hosted solution (Oracle/SAP/Hitachi/whatev). #1 & #2 have infra run using gov't workers, but #3 is run by private company. A bit like hosted/cloud Wordpress vendors.
The idea: Only gov't officials have accounts to post/update public info. There are no regular user accounts -- so no one can get banned. Then, if people want to have posting / chat rooms about a gov't facebook page, they can "reverse link" to a Discord, or something like it.
Funny example: If you live in an area with a terrible dept of motor vehicles, the DMV gov't facebook page would publish the usual info about hours, locations, rules, etc. But then people would run Discords to argue/post about which DMV location has the worst customer service! Assume the Discord server is strictly independent of gov't facebook... so Discord admins can ban whomever they like (if people say offensive stuff). But no matter what silly things people say on a private Discord, they can never be "banned" from the gov't facebook -- it is public, just like Wikipedia, but no regular users accounts.
And I can already think who already has the sales contacts and engineers to get it done: Microsoft. I can already hear the tomatoes being thrown at me... but it is true: They could do it, and it might be a huge money maker. Or SalesForce, because a lot of gov't website now need eforms to do online gov't stuff. Makes sense, I think. Two other orgs who could do it: Mozilla and/or Wikipedia. They don't have the sales contacts, but they are well-trusted by gov'ts around the globe.
This is already the current state of affairs. The state has a DMV site which is controlled by the DMV where they post all the information you probably need to know about the DMV, the online processes to do things on it, etc. If you want to talk about it, you can feel free to share a link to it anywhere you want.
For example, the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles website, available at https://www.txdmv.gov/ . They host the site, well, they pay contractors to manage and run the site. The Texas DMV controls the content on the site; companies like Facebook or Discord can't control what the State of Texas wants to publish on it.
They're making more vanity license plates, and so they have example designs and polls related to the designs on the site here: https://www.txdmv.gov/motorists/license-plates/eview we can share this link with our friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, SMS, iMessage, LINE, your own personal blog, whatever you want.
You wrote: <<This is already the current state of affairs.>>
Except every gov't agency re-writes this software. My point was to create a common standard that can work in 100+ languages and all kinds of useful features for gov't websites. Maybe Wordpress can already do everything...
Any how does Texas DMV host? On-prem, public cloud, or 3rd party hosted?
Looking at the source, its a Drupal site. So yes, at its core it is an open source software stack probably with a lot of state-owned templates, themes, and plugins made and/or managed by their contractors. Its fronted by Cloudfront, I don't know if its then being hosted on AWS, some other cloud provider, a state-run datacenter, or a raspberry pi under a desk at one of the DMV offices.
Either way, each DMV and other state agency or agencies in other states is going to want to craft the site in its own fashion for its own "brand". Whether or not this is a good thing is debatable, there's pros and cons each way IMO. You're going to need to have certain kinds of integrations and plugins into byzantine ancient computer systems that each agency also owns and manages. It'll practically never be some quick one-click deploy to make a DMV site; every DMV between all the states are different. They have different forms, different workflows, different database systems for their old systems, different priorities their state legislatures have given them, etc.
They control the primary forum for local community chat, they control the swap-meet (facebook marketplace); I have no access to any of that anymore, it used to take place on many other forums, but it has centralized on facebook, which I don't use. A fair few local orgs use facebook exclusively for communication. Some of them have public pages, some don't.
I don't really care, aside from missing the odd deal on the marketplace that I can't participate in, but I imagine this could be quite important to other people. There's got to be a better way, but I don't know what it is or how to get there.