this is how the government should communicate with its people - push out via all social media channels but always link back to something everyone can access!
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
Which is why another Democratic mayor in another blue city, who Mamdani considers “the most effective Democrat in office”, someone who inspires him - nobody knows that politicians name unless they’re really into politics. I’ll admit, even I’ve only heard of her because Mamdani name checked her.
Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
It is actually annoying that as a UK user of bsky and HN, I hear more about Mamdani than about Sadiq Khan. Mamdani is everywhere. Mind you, I'm also hearing a lot more about the former mayor of Manchester these days.
Not just the largest city, but also the city where much of our national media is based or has a very large presence. It's so bizarre when I visit friends and family in other parts of the country and they know more about my local news stories than their own cities.
I never heard of Eric Adams doing anything, ever. I couldn’t name the mayor between Adams and Giuliani. And I only know Adams because he was corrupt beyond belief. Mamdani is an outlier in how much positive attention he garners, even considering he’s mayor of NY.
You literally only said you made a link shortener, and even now give no indication you understand what aspects of the Mamdani communication strategy are being praised.
There is nothing to praise here because this is the obvious pattern. Doing anything else would have been incompetence. So yes he gets credit for hiring a competent dev, but to call him a genius for this is venturing into fanboyism / derangement.
Because you're a tech worker that sees no issues worker for some of the most evil companies on the planet whereas Mamdani wants you to have childcare + cheaper food + better infrastructure. Not hard to see who is the genius in this equation.
Given how untrustworthy the most popular social media providers have proven to be, it's madness that so many politicians and government accounts still use things like Xitter or facebook as their primary communication medium.
Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
As I understand it, Bsky doesn't punish posts for including a link off-site, and doesn't require you to be logged in to view it. Whether they'll continue to behave in a responsible way forever remains to be seen, I guess.
The great thing about Bsky is that feeds can be user-run (and the for you feed is a great success story). So if Bluesky Inc. wants to derank links on their discover feed, there are a lot of user driven feed options to counteract that
Poor systems thinking. They'd likely use Buffer or a similar social media management platform. Operating their own PDS means they control the source of truth, just like running their own Wordpress instance. Could they pay someone else to host the PDS? Sure, that works too. Either way, it is about controlling their communications infra.
The question is do you trust a healthy user-empowering ecosystem will form around a VC-fueled corporation that controls 97+% of the bluesky network? https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
I wish Mastodon had been ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. And, I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.
But, most of the Twitter folks I followed went to Bsky, so I have an account. I guess we just have to hope that even though all the signs point to a terrible end for Bsky, maybe the kind of cantankerous users who left Twitter early and built the culture there will keep them honest. The incentives are not aligned and neither are the people who run it (they honestly don't seem to like the most interesting Bsky posters very much, e.g. Link was permabanned), so, I'm not extremely hopeful.
Yes, it is software that was not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came. "Mastodon" is also the biggest Mastodon instance, where new people would first land when seeking Twitter alternatives, which was also not ready for an influx of Twitter refugees when the time came.
> I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.
It’s more like, “I wish decentralized services like the Fediverse were ready for the average person.”
Currently, if you decide to join Mastodon (which some people will correctly say is “not a thing,” ironically proving my point), you have to figure out which server to join, then find out that the server you joined is at capacity and struggling, or discover that it blocks federation with servers you might be interested in.
Bootstrapping your feed in Mastodon is also not fun.
A little sad that it's often posting screenshots of X posts there. At least the screenshot has alt text, but if you're doing alt text, why a screenshot in the first place?
Is that a screenshot from twitter? I can't open twitter but I think a lot of times they do this screenshot of text thing because it gets more engagement. It's popular on facebook and instagram too where celebrities love to screenshot their notes app
The problem with these short pithy urls is that their lifetime is limited - there's only so many initiative names and they're going to collide and be removed and replaced.
Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.
Ha! That is genuinely confusing for a moment. What is the solution? Wipe the account and archive it all somewhere? That destroys all the meta-commentary that exists in other Tweets. Maybe just some system that lets you mark all previous posts with something that says "This account is for a government official. This post was made under the tenure of a prior holder of this position."
The lifetime of the programs they link to is also limited. There's no earthly reason, when running a website in 2026, to care what Tim Berners-Lee thought about the aesthetics and purposes of URLs in 1998. It's a nice nostalgia session, but "cool urls don't change" is ironically short-sighted and has lead to well-meaning dolts embedding GUIDs and other such constructs into them. The entire concept was posited prior to the advent of on-screen phone keyboards, which make typing long heavily-punctuated urls a pain in the ass. There are a thousand reasons to salute this document and let it recede into the mists of time.
A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
Easily solved by adding an interstitial whenever a URI becomes replaced and is therefore no longer immutable, and showing the history of what it used to point to as well (in case you're coming along from an old link). By default, after 5 seconds, it could redirect to the current destination.
The public doesn't need an immutable history of URLs, they need URLs they can freaking type. When you've got pages people actually care to go to, then you can create your museum of URLs.
I think it means you can see the full URL before you click on it, so you can decide if it's a phishing scam. But why would Zohran send you to a phishing scam. If you think Zohran would phish you then don't enter his links at all.
Genuine question, what is it you don't like about Mamdani? I don't live in NYC, so I don't have first-hand experience with him, but I've not seen many complaints about him (other than things like "he broke the dress code at the swimming pool that one time", which is "Obama's tan suit" levels of petty)
I mean, as far as I'm aware, "socialism" just means that the means of production are owned socially, instead of privately. But is there anything that he's actually done that is disagreeable, or is it just that many news outlets are saying "socialism = bad, Mamdani is socialist, therefore Mamdani = bad"?
The government grocery store tender is filled with exceptionally bad ideas.
When he’s a normal politician doing normal things, he seems great. When he’s sticking to his guns on naive populist things he’s part of a worrying affection for counterproductive government programs.
Its probably socialist to expect a rando on the internet to support their nonsense with evidence, have you even paid the man to support/substantiate his shitposting?
Take the case of "city owned stores" to "combat food price inflation".
Well. The city does not actually produce food. Stores get their produce from wholesalers. This is where the "city stores" will get them as well. Only now, regular stores know the city will undercut them in price using taxpayer money. So any location next to a city store will become poison. And soon all you will have (for some people) are the city stores.
Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you. Basically, if something is cheaper than the market price, you get shortages.
Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".
There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers. And yes, this is socialism and there are very logical, rational economic reasons for why it always fail. This will be no different.
I agree with everything you said, but I think it's also a fairly low stakes experiment that might even be worth trying, and the real test of his competence as mayor is how quickly he realizes it that it won't work and shuts it down, rather than doubling or tripling down on it. Sometimes it's worth it to just take your best shot at implementing a probably bad but popular idea, as long as the consequences for failure are not too harsh.
There's a version of this, I think, that _doesn't_ fail, where they give up selling below cost and focus on setting up ABC-like grocery stores in "food deserts" that sell staple goods that bodegas don't carry.
I agree with everything you said, but is worth mentioning that while, “There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers,” is true, the most likely outcome is that (a) the stores will open and consistently lose a small amount of money, relative to the NYC budget, (b) some small grocers or bodegas will be either priced out or receive city subsidies which incur another small cost on the city’s budget, and (c) customers will experience some kind of annoying quota or identity check system which prevents aggressive arbitrage, but which ultimately doesn’t make the stores unbearable.
This will indeed be far from Pareto optimal, and a slow drain on the city’s budget and local economy, but could be successful enough that the stores can remain in operation in perpetuity, which boosters will frame as a “win”
Even if you support "helping struggling people" to pay their groceries. There are already programs for this such as SNAP. Basically means-tested programs that try to benefit people in need.
There are many ways to do redistribution for purposes of social welfare without actually competing with retailers that actually live on slim margins.
That doesn't give you as spectacular political ads or showmanship, however.
Means testing programs are intentionally burdensome to get into, put into place by conservatives who don't want free loaders. Removing that friction is a good thing
Conservatives dont want poor freeloaders, they are the biggest freeloaders and rich freeloaders are nowhere on their radar, besides wanting to emulate/become them
His perception when he was running was "popular, well intentioned, and naive" for the reasons you're outlining. Yet what people have been experiencing isn't a mayor trying to try a bunch of bad-sounding ideas; it's a mayor who is visibly trying to make the city more livable.
In an overpriced and dysfunctional city with a history of self-aggrandizing, useless governance; livability is appealing.
The moderate take is "I don't care if he calls himself a socialist as long as he's making the city run better."
Grocery stores aren't evenly distributed throughout the city, though, and there are neighborhoods were either there is no store at all nearby, or the store that exists has poor quality and high prices. In those locations, the dynamic of a city-owned store undercutting a "normal" store isn't really going to apply since there isn't really a "normal" store in the area.
So much, of course, depends on the execution -- a crappy city store won't be a help to anyone -- but the concept isn't inherently bad on its face.
If cheaper grocery prices would pull people away from more expensive stores then Wholefoods wouldn't exist. People don't simply go to the cheapest grocery store.
"Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you."
There are over 100+ no-questions-asked community-run pantries in NYC where you can get groceries for free, not to mention others that ask for some sort of ID. You'd think that the crowding and bread lines would form here first no?
> The city does not actually produce food. Stores get their produce from wholesalers.
> Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you.
These two statements don't follow one another. If the city stores are getting their goods from the same distributor any other grocery store is, why would the availability of that food dry up leading to breadlines?
> Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".
This happens in "normal" stores as well. There's a concept called a "loss leader" where a store deliberately sells some goods at lower than market rates specifically to attract shoppers.
> There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers.
My state, Idaho, has had state ran liquor stores for my entire life. Our socialist alcohol hasn't resulted in booze lines or bedlam. I see no reason why a grocery store in a very wealthy city couldn't work.
Socialism is workers seizing the means of production. No country is actually socialist at all, as in that case it means every single company is actually a coop of equal shares among the workers. Socialism does not mean when the government does something, at best that's social democracy.
Socialism is a continuum that the US has been on to some degree since its inception, it isn't a case of Capitalism good, socialism bad. Here's how I envy you: the people you have policy disagreements with will engage on those in good faith. I wish the opposite were true.
All these anti-socialists never questions who pays for their roads, their schools, their police, their fire service, the military, the FAA, the USPS, their libraries, their parks, the courts, NASA?
Are all of these right-wing people paying privately for those?
Don't get me wrong I think it is fine to question who pays for those things. And if you are one of those "I lean libertarian" types you probably are OK with private funding for NASA & USPS, but they need to be intellectually honest with why they are OK with masked federal agents roaming the streets.
It seems to me that what is "socialism" is just based on politicians personal definitions.
Basic education for the people = good
Higher education for the people = socialism
Bail outs and subsidies for businesses = good
Safety net for individuals = socialism
Public highway = good
Public railroad = socialism
I think the endless labelling of everything rightwingers don't like as "socialism" has backfired. A generation has been told that affordable food and housing, usable public transport, healthcare, not getting shot at school, not getting racially abused etc. are "socialism". So obviously they want to have some of this "socialism" as soon as possible.
He identifies as a socialist, sure, but his implemented policies (what GGP was calling socialist) are mostly standard-issue municipal management.
Is it socialism to hire temporary labor for snow removal? To fix potholes? My boring municipality in the middle of a red state does that and nobody calls it socialist.
If we want to be fair, it depends on the characterization and its intended implications. The right has called every Democrat since FDR a "socialist" specifically to put the fear of tanks in the streets and death camps into people regardless of their actual policies. They called Obama a socialist. They called Hillary Clinton a socialist.
So even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that versus what people calling him a socialist what you to think.
This line of thought bugs me. We use labels for a reason. Socialism has a well accepted definition and has for decades. We haven't modified it's meaning. I think it's fine to take someone at their word if they use a label. It's not on me to interrogate whether they mean something else when they use the label. It's on them to use the label correctly if they want to communicate. Especially if they are a politician where the entire job is to communicate and persuade.
There is no "well accepted definition" for any political term, least of all any political term from the left, each which has been co-opted by the right to the point that most are simply pejoratives and slurs in common parlance. Just look at "woke" for an example. No one using it anymore uses it in good faith, certainly not on the left.
What we have with "socialism" is the entire spectrum of what socialists themselves believe (and can't often agree upon) and what their opponents insist upon. A European style social democrat and an anarcho-syndicalist have radically different goals, but both would be considered "socialist" by most people. As would - just to point out the absurdity of it - Joe Biden, to half the country.
It is absolutely on you, and all of us, to think beyond "labels," otherwise you just make yourself susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, or at least incapable of fighting it.
Yeah, no. I am neither left or right these days and I see just as many attempts to coopt terms to have a different meaning from each side. My solve is to refuse to participate. If you want to communicate to me then you are going to have use the accepted definition not the definition you want me to believe instead. If you say you are a socialist then I will believe you. If you say you are a christian nationalist then I will believe you. I'm not interested in what your enemies want me to believe the term means. I'm only interested in the fact that you used it and it has real definition.
Any other road leads to madness and an absence of shared meaning. I will hold you to the standard of your own language and actions. Use the words correctly or be misunderstood. That's on you not me.
>If you want to communicate to me then you are going to have use the accepted definition not the definition you want me to believe instead.
And by "accepted definition" you mean "definition accepted by you."
There are few personality traits I find as insufferable as language prescriptivism, it always seems to hide a rigid and doctrinaire worldview. I won't waste your time or mine further. Good night.
Right, the argument is "He is a socialist so when he gets power he will do X which I dislike". But now he is in power so the argument is moot. Instead, you have to list actions by him you dislike.
Yeah, I was surprised to see a downvote for that. Isn’t that like his position? I don’t believe in socialism. He seems like a nice guy. These aren’t incompatible.
This is nothing new. The most socialistic era of US history was the 1950s with a 90% federal income tax bracket capping yearly income to a max of 5mil a year in 2026 dollars. That is how we ended the great depression.
When a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, understaffing, and outsourcing; all of those things stop. This is why republicans called everyone a communist back in the 1950s. It is sad that people remember mccarthyism, but completely forget the socialistic tax policy that ended the great depression and made it possible to own a home out of high school while raising a family off a single income.
Hey buddy I’m not a “right winger”, I’m dead center with a voting record that reflects that. His policies are on the left end of the spectrum, whether that fits your model of the truth or not.
That’s totalitarian communism. Parent is talking about social democracy with a larger safety net. I’m not aware of gulags in the Netherlands or Sweden but maybe I haven’t looked hard enough.
I was just in here a while ago calling leftist class war stuff conspiracism BTW, so I’m equal opportunity.
Just so much bullshit everywhere. We’d have a much better discourse if words meant things and if we could toss the hyperbole and the conspiracy theories from all sides.
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
Mamdani’s every tiny initiative gets tonnes of PR because Mamdani and his team are masters of media. That’s what sets him apart from Michelle Wu or anyone else.
big tech has long canceled url on phones.
Even ignoring the political misinformation that is rampant on these platforms and often promoted widely by the platform because it is inflammatory and gets lots of engagement, they also severely punish posts that link away from the site, which public safety and government accounts obviously need to do. It's a hazard for public safety info to be targeted primarily at a feed designed to bury it. Even if you're following those accounts on Xitter or facebook, they're effectively never going to show you their posts.
But, most of the Twitter folks I followed went to Bsky, so I have an account. I guess we just have to hope that even though all the signs point to a terrible end for Bsky, maybe the kind of cantankerous users who left Twitter early and built the culture there will keep them honest. The incentives are not aligned and neither are the people who run it (they honestly don't seem to like the most interesting Bsky posters very much, e.g. Link was permabanned), so, I'm not extremely hopeful.
> I wish the average person was ready for decentralized services like the fediverse.
It’s more like, “I wish decentralized services like the Fediverse were ready for the average person.”
Currently, if you decide to join Mastodon (which some people will correctly say is “not a thing,” ironically proving my point), you have to figure out which server to join, then find out that the server you joined is at capacity and struggling, or discover that it blocks federation with servers you might be interested in.
Bootstrapping your feed in Mastodon is also not fun.
Cool uris don't change[1]. Short, readable uris are great but they should be merely redirecs, and the mapping should be version controlled and exposed to the public as an immutable history.
[1] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
A municipal website should be useful to the citizens who want to use it. This is a great example of doing something useful with the web.
That way we a) don't lose track of relevant content but b) can have nice things such as short URLs with good names.
Any usage of short links can (and sometimes should) link to a canonical source with an immutable URI. This is just a foreign key for humans.
Functions exactly like tinyurl, generally used by public officers for the various programmes/initiatives from the ministries and agencies.
not sure why they have never done that before
The government grocery store tender is filled with exceptionally bad ideas.
When he’s a normal politician doing normal things, he seems great. When he’s sticking to his guns on naive populist things he’s part of a worrying affection for counterproductive government programs.
Why volunteer such?
Under capitalism there is no honorific obligationism. Pay me to give a shit you exist or go hungry and die
What's that? You want a social and communal society?
Sounds like naive populism.
Socialism has the same problem, except it's "go to work and give a shit for less money or all of society dies"
Name one, just for discussion's sake.
Well. The city does not actually produce food. Stores get their produce from wholesalers. This is where the "city stores" will get them as well. Only now, regular stores know the city will undercut them in price using taxpayer money. So any location next to a city store will become poison. And soon all you will have (for some people) are the city stores.
Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you. Basically, if something is cheaper than the market price, you get shortages.
Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".
There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers. And yes, this is socialism and there are very logical, rational economic reasons for why it always fail. This will be no different.
There's a version of this, I think, that _doesn't_ fail, where they give up selling below cost and focus on setting up ABC-like grocery stores in "food deserts" that sell staple goods that bodegas don't carry.
This will indeed be far from Pareto optimal, and a slow drain on the city’s budget and local economy, but could be successful enough that the stores can remain in operation in perpetuity, which boosters will frame as a “win”
There are many ways to do redistribution for purposes of social welfare without actually competing with retailers that actually live on slim margins.
That doesn't give you as spectacular political ads or showmanship, however.
His perception when he was running was "popular, well intentioned, and naive" for the reasons you're outlining. Yet what people have been experiencing isn't a mayor trying to try a bunch of bad-sounding ideas; it's a mayor who is visibly trying to make the city more livable.
In an overpriced and dysfunctional city with a history of self-aggrandizing, useless governance; livability is appealing.
The moderate take is "I don't care if he calls himself a socialist as long as he's making the city run better."
So much, of course, depends on the execution -- a crappy city store won't be a help to anyone -- but the concept isn't inherently bad on its face.
"Of course, with prices much cheaper than in other parts, you will likely get crowding at these stores. Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you."
There are over 100+ no-questions-asked community-run pantries in NYC where you can get groceries for free, not to mention others that ask for some sort of ID. You'd think that the crowding and bread lines would form here first no?
You should look into how dollar stores eviscerated rural markets. Or even what walmart did.
People absolutely go to the cheapest stores. Whole Foods selling to a wealthier minority is not a counter factual here.
> Leading to the infamous bread lines of the Soviet Union or Venezuela or what have you.
These two statements don't follow one another. If the city stores are getting their goods from the same distributor any other grocery store is, why would the availability of that food dry up leading to breadlines?
> Ironically, the city sets prices based on a relative level to "normal stores". So it's not as if this is some "good capitalist competition". It's not as if it's a "temporary measure until catastrophe A is over".
This happens in "normal" stores as well. There's a concept called a "loss leader" where a store deliberately sells some goods at lower than market rates specifically to attract shoppers.
> There is put simply no way this experiment ends in a way that is positive for New Yorkers.
My state, Idaho, has had state ran liquor stores for my entire life. Our socialist alcohol hasn't resulted in booze lines or bedlam. I see no reason why a grocery store in a very wealthy city couldn't work.
IDK why he calls that a city-owned store, he should just say that the city has started a VC program aimed to fund startups in the retail sector.
Are all of these right-wing people paying privately for those?
(The guy is joking in the video)
Is it socialism to hire temporary labor for snow removal? To fix potholes? My boring municipality in the middle of a red state does that and nobody calls it socialist.
I will never not be amazed at the US meaning of "red state" vs. what the rest of the world means by "red state".
So even if Mamdani calls himself a socialist it's important to ask what he means by that versus what people calling him a socialist what you to think.
What we have with "socialism" is the entire spectrum of what socialists themselves believe (and can't often agree upon) and what their opponents insist upon. A European style social democrat and an anarcho-syndicalist have radically different goals, but both would be considered "socialist" by most people. As would - just to point out the absurdity of it - Joe Biden, to half the country.
It is absolutely on you, and all of us, to think beyond "labels," otherwise you just make yourself susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, or at least incapable of fighting it.
Any other road leads to madness and an absence of shared meaning. I will hold you to the standard of your own language and actions. Use the words correctly or be misunderstood. That's on you not me.
And by "accepted definition" you mean "definition accepted by you."
There are few personality traits I find as insufferable as language prescriptivism, it always seems to hide a rigid and doctrinaire worldview. I won't waste your time or mine further. Good night.
When a CEO cannot personally get richer by cutting wages, understaffing, and outsourcing; all of those things stop. This is why republicans called everyone a communist back in the 1950s. It is sad that people remember mccarthyism, but completely forget the socialistic tax policy that ended the great depression and made it possible to own a home out of high school while raising a family off a single income.
Depends on how one defines "socialist"
> Some of us still perceive that as a bad thing.
Then what's wrong with you? Look at other first world countries.
All this "socialism bad" bullshit needs to stop. It has no basis in reality.
It has some basis, perhaps consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_North_Korean_famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derg
I was just in here a while ago calling leftist class war stuff conspiracism BTW, so I’m equal opportunity.
Just so much bullshit everywhere. We’d have a much better discourse if words meant things and if we could toss the hyperbole and the conspiracy theories from all sides.