How do you decentralise emergency alerts?

Twitter's decision to hobble its API has meant that a number of useful alerting bots might no longer function. Your local subway might not be able to Tweet each morning about delays on the line, nor will a tornado warning be displayed as you scroll through photos of brunch, and forget about flood alerts between your memes.

In one sense, this is sad. A set of useful public services are being cut off from their audience. My friend, Bill Thompson, described this as "unnecessary disruption" I, on the other hand, think that creative destruction is sometimes a necessity.

You can listen to more of the discussion on the Gareth and BillCast about 19 minutes in.

Look, first off, it makes sense for organisations to put warning messages where their audience is likely to see it. No one sensible begrudges that. Twitter is a channel just as legitimate as radio, TV, or loudhailers in the street.

The problem comes when that's the only channel.

Twitter, somewhat accidentally, set itself up as a replacement for the public sphere. Now it has made it clear exactly what the cost of "free speech" is - alert bots are abandoning it.

Almost all the bots I mentioned above have websites. You can go check them, if you remember - but that isn't the same as having their warnings mixed in with your daily scrolling.

Some of those bots also have RSS feeds. But the RSS model doesn't lend itself to your peer group reposting urgent content into your feed.

And none of those websites and feeds are easily discoverable if you're in a new city.

So, how could this be solved with ActivityPub / Mastodon / Fediverse?

On the one hand, it's pretty easy for any organisation to set up a decentralised service with their alerts. Visiting https:// mass_transit.ak will show you all of Arstotzka's transport bots. You could subscribe to @flood-warnings@alerts.gov.ak for Arstotzka's official warnings.

On Twitter, it's easy to search "Train Delays London" and see everything. Hopefully including one of the accounts which gives you official alerts.

But, one of the interesting problems with a decentralised service is that search is (deliberately⁰) difficult. Unless someone you're already following happens to share an alert, it can be very difficult to find relevant posts and accounts.

There is something of a solution which, I think, could be helpful. ActivityPub defines a way to add location to a post.

 JSON{

  "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",

  "type": "Note",

  "name": "Arstotzka' Flood Service:",

  "content": "Heavy rains! Expect flooding and major disruption.",

    "location": {

       "name": "Arstotzka Central District,

       "type": "Place",

       "longitude": 12.34,

       "latitude": 56.78,

    }

}

At the moment, there's no way to search for geo-tagged posts - but it doesn't have to be that way. It is relatively simple to use the Haversine formula to select database entries which are within a geographic area.

But, the key problem is too much decentralisation. It goes against the credo of redecentralization to have a single server called official-alerts.com - having a single destination to search is convenient, but provides for a single point of failure.

A country might have alerts.ak which has multiple accounts, or might have single-use instances like flood.ak and fire.ak and traffic.ak. They might be federated to, for example, official-alert-service.eu.

At which point, I get stuck.

How does a user discover these accounts?

There are three options, as I see it:

1. Advertising. The organisation promotes these accounts via other channels.
2. Serendipity. A user sees that another user has shared one of these accounts.
3. Better discovery tools. A user's instance could recommend accounts to follow based on geography or other factors.

Thoughts?