How could the railway effectively replace Twitter?

[Bletchleyite]

if Mastadon is the solution i suspect it would be a gov wide server pool rather than one per department

A National Rail Mastodon server might be an option. But if standing up infrastructure, an improved and updated JourneyCheck (including an associated Android and iOS app*) plus the ability to chat by text or Whatsapp is probably easier and more inclusive.

Of course all this costs money and Twitter largely doesn't...

* Yes, you can bookmark it, and you can turn a website into an app icon. But most users won't know how to do this, so an app that literally just shows you the website is valuable in this sort of context. Plus an app can do stuff like show you "how is my line doing" widgets on your home and lock screens.

 

[O L Leigh]

Technical considerations aside, whatever gets used instead of Twitter needs to have reach. My own suspicion is that most users will simply go looking for a Twitter-alike replacement on their app store rather than seeking out something specific that the rail industry puts out. They're likely to want it to be a multi-purpose platform that they can use to share information around their own social network as well as using it to communicate with the rail industry. As such, whatever overtakes Twitter as the social networking platform of choice is likely to be dictated by the end users rather than by corporate entities.

Cool functionality aside, if it's not attractive to people except as a sort of National Rail Enquiries app with a live operator that permits interaction, it's not going to fly.

 

[317 forever]

How could the railway effectively replace Twitter?

Elon Musk could buy the railway, merge it with Twitter and abolish the Twitter brand.

 

[PG]

In recent pre-Musk times, you can't scroll more than a couple of messages before it locks further reading and tells you to sign in.

I have not and will never sign up to Twitter, of Facebook. I am not a luddite, I value my privacy.

Receiving information should never require a login to an unrelated third party.

I'm not on Twitter for the same reason. You can however bypass the sign in option by clicking to log-in and then clicking on the X in the pop-up sign in window, to read further messages

However I've found a better way of reading messages is to use the open source https://nitter.net which offers the same functionality - in any Twitter URL simply replace twitter.com or any of its short forms with nitter.net

As such, whatever overtakes Twitter as the social networking platform of choice is likely to be dictated by the end users rather than by corporate entities.

Agreed.

How is the single GBR website including ticket sales getting on?

No idea but I'm not holding my breath for its appearance any time soon.

 

[MCSHF007]

I'm more than happy to continue using Twitter (whilstsoever it still exists of course) and hope that "The Railway" does so too. Used intelligently it's an incredibly useful tool.