Japanese disaster prevention X account can’t post anymore after hitting API limit - The issue has arisen after major Tsunami warnings have been issued in areas of Japan following a strong earthquake::undefined
Why governments would ever use a private service for critical use baffles me.
Create your own emergency notification system!
They have one, but you also want information to be where people are. Especially if where people are is full of misinformation and rumours.
Japan has various earthquake notification systems. Tweets are just one more way to get the information to the people on a platform they use.
Create your own emergency notification system!
Those never turn out well.
Running their own mastodon instance should be viable though.
I remember seeing that they did have a fediverse account? This seems related to that
Yup see here:
It’s also in the article linked above:
Luckily, the creators of the NERV App, Gehirn Inc, have created an app-based alternative for users to get information in real-time, as well as running a Mastodon account.
The Los Angeles/ California earthquake alert system worked just fine today.
Does that go through regular EAS? Wondering.
FWIW, Japan does have emergency alerts on iOS and Android, same thing as the Netherlands and the UK.
Is Mastodon even viable for time sensitive information? You need to wait for your instance to propagate the post from their instance which can take time.
As opposed to waiting until next month for your API call limit to reset?
I’d suggest they join a system that has users, proper SLA and an open frontpage.
As much as you might like Mastodon for being open, there are no SLA between instances. Bluesky or Threads likely do.
Not saying they shouldn’t start their own Mastodon, but not for emergency and time sensitive things. Or just for people who can’t access those other services. More options also mean more reach.
They made their own: https://unnerv.jp/@UN_NERV
Is Twitter/X viable for that? They can decide, and have, to randomly put information behind login walls.
It’s a secondary feature of a mysterious enterprise, unknown to americans, called “public media”
Just mass send SMSs in a given area
Cell phones already have the emergency alert system they could just use that.
One thing I wish iOS/Android did was have the option for these emergency alerts to be multilingual, or provide some sort of auto translation. When i was in Japan in November, I received an emergency alert due to NK launching some missiles. It’s pretty scary to have your phone blow up with a loud alarm, and not being able to read the alert because it’s in Japanese. On iOS, you also can’t just copy the notification to translate it. I had to take a picture, and then have Google Translate translate it.
I was anticipating some big earthquake, but turned out to be a child playing with his rockets.
I’m able to take a screenshot and translate this comment in the photos app in iOS.
Edit: I have no idea how good the translation is, but I’ve done it this way for things that needed translation.
You’re right, but that was my point, you have to take a screenshot and translate it. It wasn’t something I thought about when my phone was blasting out a loud alarm.
In those kind of emergencies, either it should’ve been auto translated to the users’ default language, or a quick translate option should be available.
Remember when just about every government employee was carrying around a BlackBerry device for official business?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I remember when they all loved the Nextel PTT phones.
This same issue happened during wildfire season in BC, Canada if I recall. A small polite media outrage over it, then forgotten.
Best case scenario would be an independent, international system developed within and for the emergency services community worldwide. Judging by the way firefighters travel internationally to fight forest fires worldwide, the community could be strong enough to support a solution like that, in my opinion.
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For reference, the article I’m referring to:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/twitter-policy-change-hampers-drivebc-1.6894793
“Social media’s reliability in emergencies questioned after Twitter limit blocks DriveBC posts” (Jul 12).
Whether a provincial traffic account posting emergency info counts as news links for these large companies or not, it’s a pretty ugly look for them to have been blocking emergency information, and it doesn’t look any better now 6 months later.
The whole thing is pretty typical (Canadian) government “not enough, and too late” -style regulation regardless, but these social media sites could think twice about playing the villain so readily in response.
It makes a lot of sense to post where the people are. Roll your own and note the people need your app/etc. granted, everyone is reading X on their smartphone and I’m 100% positive that Japan has the same kind of emergency broadcast system that we have in North America, but again that’s not meant for lots of messages, where a social networking site is.
NERV isnt owned by gov and:
Luckily, the creators of the NERV App, Gehirn Inc, have created an app-based alternative for users to get information in real-time, as well as running a Mastodon account.
It’s almost like trying to run the world on social media was a shit tier idea.
It was a good way to offload responsibility for something actually working.
With social media the unreliability card has been played (by us, asocial nerds, killjoys and neckbeards) and beaten (by them, normal sane social successful people) 10+ years ago, so even when it’s a serious role being discussed, that card can’t be played again.
It worked pretty well for what it was created to do, then corporations and governments thought they could profit off of it. I assume they were also concerned that people were starting to talk about things they didn’t want people to talk about, like their penchant for buying and selling children.
It worked pretty well for what it was created to do
Which is the unknown variable in this conversation.
Say, for my ends social media never worked well.
It pains me to communicate with many (by my measure) friends and acquaintances, knowing that those are basically DMs on a site ran by somebody and hundreds (or maybe thousands) of employees can just read those DMs. Writing personal things there, because people refuse to be worried about being likely eavesdropped on.
In general the worst prison is the one you’ve built for yourself and locked yourself in. And to learn to sing one has to start singing.
I can understand what you mean.
I suppose on my end the reason that social media exists was as a forum for open communication with strangers that you would never actually meet in real life, generally to discuss interests and hobbies, or to just shoot the shit. I’ve never viewed it as a platform for replacing the methods we already had for communicating with people we did know in real life, such as phone, or just meeting with them face to face.
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How about avoiding commercial platforms when it comes to vitally important official communication?
They do, all phones get an emergency alert and tvs display a message. Twitter was another vector to spread the word out.
Well. Then they should tell those people who still use X that this is an unreliable source. For anything else it already is, anyway.
Or maybe if you use x you should be smart enough to understand what’s going on already lol
I don’t rate people who still use X as “smart”.
Problem is that no noncommercial platform would ever have the same coverage as a commercial one like X. People simply would not see the necessity to install it until it’s too late.
This is just a failure in government/governance.
There is literally an opportunity for every nation in the world to run it’s own social media service as a hub for government services, alerts etc. If a couple of them did it open source it could be a world standard for government. Even now the wealthiest nations are scrambling to do something like this but it’s too little, too late.
And even when they figure out software/process there’s no government infrastructure that can compete with the private sector. Amazon in particular are a scary one to me - the amount of sensitive data governments around the world casually chuck into S3 is going to end very badly for a lot of people.
We need governments to get serious about digital infrastructure and security, in the same way they ensure food security, sanitation. Digital capability is just not negotiable anymore, it’s vital.
Android & IOS have an emergency alert system that the government can use if they want to.
It doesn’t have to be an entire service. It could be a Mastodon / Lemmy node under their own control, but they should still mirror the information to other social media platforms, perhaps with a link underneath pointing to their own server as source of truth.
This is quite frankly what all NGOs, news orgs and major companies should do - federate so they can moderate their own message. Seems bizarre to me that the BBC, or UN, or NATO or whatever wouldn’t want to control their messaging this way. But realistically they do need to mirror the message out to other services.
Problem is there’s no expertise in house. The Australian government is currently scrambling to build in-house expertise with regards to project management, technical insight and recruitment. They’ve been haemorrhaging cash just trying to do those basic things via external agencies, it’s a shit show of wasted taxpayer dollars. And the contracts are only available to big firms whose owners went to school with whatever government is in power… very cool system!
Chances are your government already releases info on its sites. When was the last time you looked?
I look frequently as I am a developer that works on government sites lol
Could always go the route of an amber alert-like system being primary and then pipe the same msg to their secondary commercial platforms (like X). I’m not privy on the details but it sounds irresponsible to rely on X primarily/solely.
That’s what they’re doing, Twitter/X is only redundancy
Oh nice this sounds less worse than it seems then
I bet they spam that message through every medium they can - TV, radio, loudspeakers, phone alert, text, traffic signs, all the social media platforms.
Imagine if the only alert of the impending death wave was some federated lemmy server which was having a few network problems that day.
I get all the local disaster updates from startek.website!
So far, nothing has been reported, but I have a feeling the users will come pouring in soon!
Aaaaaaaany day now…
My house flooded. But it’s not reported, so it didn’t happen!
The thing is, they communicate where people’s at. People gotta move
People will move if they learn that their lives are at stake by using X.
Love it when corporations have more power than government entities.
The dystopian future is coming faster than ever
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That crazy dystopian future where the government has to abide by the terms and conditions of private corporations. So wild. 🙄
I feel like this is warranted:
Fuck Elon.
Come on, this is totally the japanese government’s fault. They should be aware of the limits of the services they use. How are we blaming Twitter for the incompetence of the japanese government? I get that we want to hate in Twitter but how incompetent is that team? A disaster prevention team didn’t forsee the limits of the communication services they use?
I don’t like Twitter but come on, stop shifting the blame.
Twitter worked. Elon bought it. Enshittification ensued. Twitter broke. Hmmm…
What an astute and elaborate explanation. Surely this is this answer and the guy you responded to is definitely over simplifying it.
Sounds like it’s time for governments to get off Xitter.
Everyone should.
Letting people senselessly get injured or die seems to be a common theme in Elon’s ventures, so I’m not all that surprised about this.
Why is a critical service like disaster precention using an unreliable service like Twitter?
It’s probably one of numerous ways they try and reach people. Wouldn’t be surprised if they have it set up to spam alerts out through various mechanisms including social media. It’s just that one platform is now complete dogshit. Maybe this failure will hasten Twitter’s decline in Japan.
Why not? Wouldn’t you want information going out on every available service? They likely have info going out on Facebook as well.
Let me just pull out the old Pidgeon
@L4s Just FYI the NERV app mentioned on the article is not government official. (Althought I believe it uses government oficial APIs for earthquake detection)
That’s a bot account BTW. There’s a flag next to the name to indicate that but I guess it’s not visible on mastodon.
Yeah, it just added automatically when hitting Reply here on masto. TIL that if you delete the @ mention, it still becomes a thread :)
If you’re already replying to someone, the @ seems totally redundant.
It’s just the default way on masto, I guess for microblogging historical reasons.
But the town square!!!111
This is how I feel…
NERV announcements got blocked? I guess he’s not getting in the robot after all
Time to switch to mastodon.
Did you even bother to read the article?
Luckily, the creators of the NERV App, Gehirn Inc, have created an app-based alternative for users to get information in real-time, as well as running a Mastodon account
Yes. They need to dump twitter
The problem here is they need to stay where the users are. It doesn’t matter if Twitter is shit, as long as that’s where people are the broadcasts need to be there to reach as many people as possible. Hell, if 90% of the people are on IRC then they should also support IRC. Dumping Twitter isn’t going to make it better, it would only mean people are less likely to get warnings -> more people in danger.
At least with a half broken app there’s still a chance.
Maybe, but a wouldn’t it be way better to rely on a service every cellphone can receive by default, namely cell broadcast?
They even implemented this in Germany a few years ago after it has been available for twenty odd years.
Pretty sure emergency mobile broadcasts are included (at least by gov agencies) but you know what happens with these things that are only used for emergencies:
“It’s annoying can’t I turn it off?”
That’s why I still think the more methods the better. It’s probably one of the few reasons I’m okay with being bombarded with messages (not in jp, but literally got 2 earthquake warnings yesterday).
It looks like Japan’s current implementation of their J-Alert system can start warning citizen about 2 seconds after the info is automatically received by the system. It warns them via nationwide loudspeakers, TV, radio, email, and cell phones. So they’ve got their bases covered, so to speak. They may be able to turn off alerts on their phone (the article doesn’t say), but probably not on anything else. Definitely not the loudspeakers.
Kind of! Their Masto feed could be an RSS that feeds into all platforms. Decentralise!!!
Switch to != just use it on the side. Drop X, loudly make clear why, and point people to Mastodon.
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In case you would benefit from a warning but they get rate limited and can’t send it.
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They are on mastodon
Oh come on man, reading articles is so 2023.
I didn’t read the article either, I just saw someone’s correction in the comments 🤷 I just wanted them to know. My use of italics probably made my comment come off as more snarky or condescending than I meant for it to :/
they should dump twitter!
Twitter? What is this, 2023? :)
Have you actually seen Japan social media usage? They’re like the second largest Twitter market in the world. Why would they be more attuned to Mastodon vs Twitter?
Society if people read the article:
I read the title. Had some thoughts and opinions. After reading the article, the thoughts and opinions remain the same.
The article lists prices for next level api requests but it’s 5000 dollars compared to the 100 that the non profit is already paying. They encouraged users to download their app to receive potentially life saving alerts.
I summed up the article in three sentences.
I’m not defending X or anything, I’m just asking people to read the damn article before going in with the obligatory “Why not Mastodon?” If they had read the article, they would’ve known that the project has a Mastodon account already and we wouldn’t have been wasting our time.
Fair. The common user uses the easiest, most accessible programs and applications. At this time, lemmy or mastodon is not common.
Make a fancy colorful app with big buttons and fun pictures and people will flock here. From what I see, the common user base here is advanced level tech people.
That’s ugly and scary, use this instead
That looks like it supports a few dozen people, maybe?
Not sure if it’s the residential part
Or how about this?
bugs. bugs everywhere. damage from roots. watering nightmare.
I don’t think any more bugs than an average suburban neighborhood. If you look closely, it’s a lot less dense than it appears, although even people who live in rural areas don’t have some super insect problem. Damage from roots can be mitigated by using the proper construction materials. You don’t have to water anything. It’s outside.
I grew up in Jamaica. If that image comes with the eradication of mosquitoes, I’d be more open to the idea! Even the sturdiest materials, proper drainage, and regular pruning would eventually see erosion issues and excessive maintenance requirements. But I’m certainly not an engineer that could solve for all the long term concerns.
Here’s some picture of commie blocks for reference I guess:
Slightly better ? still looks like a giant lawn with masturbatory buildings
Aseptic lawns ? glass & metal buildings ? flying cars ? Surefire way of preventing me from reading any future article
If only there was some sort of legal agreement that should and could be reached when the govt wants to use some private platform to communicate something important to people. If only.
I can’t even install software on my work computer unless IT and security have vetted it, questioned the company if necessary, and approved it. Government and corporate use of social media platforms should be no different. I bet the lack of privacy most of these platforms have wound be against the security policy of any company with a competent IT and/or compliance team. Imagine what social media would be like if all the corporate clients were just like “nope, not happening”, hell, we might even have slightly more responsible social media platforms.
Mastodon is a thing and they will own their instance.
Doesn’t help if people don’t use it.
That said, they should definitely stop using the thing formerly known as Twitter.
Use news outlets, public radio and TV and SMS alerts, those are “correct” ways of handling such situations, social media is not.Shouldn’t they use every means in their disposal? I know for myself I don’t watch OTA or cable news, and I don’t listen to public radio. Sure, SMS alerts are great, but the more widespread the messaging, the better.
Well the obvious answer would probably be yes, but I’m not so sure. We shouldn’t make either institutions or people expect they can use and find this sort of information on social media, as social media is inherently unreliable for many reasons.
Mastodon can be used as a feed and integrated on websites easily. People can follow the latest news and reports about the disaster. They don’t need to use mastodon or follow them. People need to know this is the right place to go to for a live ticker about a dessaster with an easy URL like disaster.gov.jp.
On top of this, they are independent with their own instance and don’t rely on social media companies servers.
TV and radio are definitely not the right place anymore. Too many people live without them. SMS can be a thing. We
I see no reason not to include social media in the mix.
Fun fact: Germany has a mastodon instance and is using it.
@L4s Gee thanks Elon
