This thread by @rvawonk digs into how central Twitter has become to relaying information during disasters, how terrible it will be to suddenly lose it.
https://twitter.com/RVAwonk/status/1592347386684506113
Yep, still angry about it.
I have been pondering how the underlying structure of a federated network like Mastodon - and the specific 'antiviral' choices made in its design - would struggle to naturally replicate this particular facet of Twitter.
It could be overcome, but it's probably not something that would happen naturally.
@allochthonous Two main issues due to the distributed / federated system.
- Finding people (fellow researchers, medias, etc) to follow
- Same (and more complicated) for the general public and media people, by the way not really here yet.
No way to easily search for somebody knowing their name as on twitter (assuming they are publicly using it). Same for hashtags: as far as I understand I cannot explore the full fediverse for e.g. #earthquake
@RobinLacassin @allochthonous Yes, I think you can search all of instances that your home server knows and does not block. This is somewhat limiting but means that a hashtag is less likely to be polluted by bad actors.
@RobinLacassin Yes, as I understand it the search will only be on instances known to your home instance. There is also the issue of communication delays between instances (although that might be a particular problem right now in this time of high growth).
You could build a tool that would directly search multiple instances.