> It almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website
Won't happen in the US/UK because the governments are in Elon's pockets. Won't happen in the EU because they are incapable of getting anything done.
So unless you're in a jurisdiction other than the above three I wouldn't hold your breath about any laws being passed about this.
I'm in the UK and tired of basic public services like the railway company posting service updates to X first. I keep a bookmark to the local train company (Northern in my case) on XCancel but while it was down, I was a bit under-informed. The stuff is on their own website, but it seems to appear there after it appears on X, the layout is crap, and there's no way to contact the company other than via X.
A lot of private companies do the same thing - no way to effectively contact them privately, but as soon as you whinge publicly on X they're "on it". Octopus Energy is one of the worst for that.
What's their account? I think it would be useful to have a fault-isolated Nitter set up just for such important accounts.
More or less the same over here in Germany, except with WhatsApp, which is only slightly better than X, but at least you are likely to already have it installed because of all your contacts that refuse to use a more secure messaging app...
At least WhatsApp isn't enshittified yet.
I think at best you could propose that public information be available without login.
I don't think it's even about being in anyones pocket. They want the publicity. And unless they are all forced to stop using it, everyone has to use it.
> And unless they are all forced to stop using it...
I was talking about the political will to mandate "forcing them to stop using it".
The UK doesn't actually have the economic and political will to put together a national Mastodon or Bluesky instance and mandate that all public agencies use it for their announcements. I'm sure there are three fact-finding committees about it at the moment though.
Partially true. We can make better front ends just for this information. Imagine traindelays.com or whatever. If it's better than Twitter then people will go there, and then we can get a direct feed from the train company, and then they can abandon Twitter.