The last few years (the last decade? when was the starting point?) have seen things get decidedly worse. Weather is hotter, more variable. In 2021, Lytton, British Columbia burned after a wildfire got out of control. The area had record setting temperatures, peaking at over 49C. I was born in BC, and the Interior gets warm, but not like that. There are lots of similar stories. Spain is supposed to get ground temperatures above 50 degrees. People are dying from heat and it's only going to get worse. The last few years we've all been learning about wet bulb temperatures. Everyone's wondering what's going to happen 10, 20, 40 years down the line, but climate change is hitting what feels like exponentially quicker than we expected. Now I'm wondering what next year will be like. Should I start a little light hoarding? I just opened a new sack of rice - should I get another, just in case?
When things get bad in a hurry, governments have a number of ways to get information out quickly. Website updates are in some sense the most traditional, but increasingly it seems that governments, at a variety of levels, have relied on Twitter.
Social media's reliability in emergencies questioned after Twitter rate limit blocks DriveBC posts
In early July, Twitter started rate-limiting accounts. Officially, the explanation was that this was to prevent scraping; unofficially, it's often thought that perhaps someone didn't pay a bill, and lost capacity; and regardless, that's a deeply irresponsible decision from a website that, in the past, saw itself as maybe _the_ conduit for breaking news. Perhaps unsurprising, given the new owner. But we're in the middle of wildfire season, and a few weeks ago, BC's provincial government was unable to get information distributed on the platform. People couldn't view the tweets. An absolute mess, and one that, in addition to damning Twitter (again) in the Elon Musk era (again), also points out the problems of relying on the benevolence of social media platforms, or at least those owned by a capricious billionaire riding a midlife crisis.
Germany on Twitter suspensions: 'We have a problem, @Twitter'
lemmy.world: Dutch government officially launches Mastodon server
Governments have started taking notice of the instability of the platform, both the ownership and the availability. It seems like every now and then there's a jolt to the technological status quo - I remember in the 00s, European governments were starting to embrace Linux and Open Office. More recently, Libre Office. And with the announcement by the Dutch government that they are launching their own Mastodon server, it feels like another tick in that direction.
From a reach perspective, it may not make sense. Not a lot of people use Mastodon, compared to the traditional social media platforms, though 10M+ users worldwide still isn't nothing. But looking at it from another angle, it's absolutely the right thing to do. It's free (in terms of price, in terms of lack of tracking), and people can just sign up on J. Random Mastodon instance, install the app on their phone, follow accounts on whatever servers they want. Running their own instance ensures that, in a crisis, governments and international organizations aren't relying on the goodwill of a bad actor. I've been hoping the Canadian government will make a similar sort of decision; these things work slowly, so maybe that's in the works? Mastodon is something I don't love, but I actually use. It feels like it could fill this role well.
And regardless, we (we the people, we our governments, the collective we in many senses) are going to need to figure out a solution, and contingency plans, and quickly. Because it feels like in some ways we've crossed a point of no return. The weather isn't going to get better. We're going to deal with droughts, with wildfires, with crop failures, and if you think you've got a worst-case scenario, I'd urge you to think even darker. Best case scenario, we find a way to navigate our way through an increasingly volatile world. If not, we're posting through collapse. And in either of these cases, we're going to need to get information out, and quickly. The world is changing in some profoundly bad ways and we're going to have to figure out how to do the best for each other as the mercury climbs and the heat gets worse.