Do local traffic, emergency, & weather accounts, too.
Literally the only thing I miss about Xitter are the up to the minute traffic & weather accounts. When you were suddenly stuck in traffic, it was so useful, at least here in Seattle, to bring up WSDOT/SDOT to find out what was going on.
This is quite a major declaration of intent. They are not going to let the invite code thing stop journalists migrating. And they know that that is key to taking over from Twitter. And they are actively trying to do that now. No concern for Jack's old creation.
When @darklament.bsky.social & I were stuck on a grounded ferry back in April, we found out more info, like whether the ferry had been towed back to dock & what time to pick up our car, on Twitter than what the actual ferry service told us.
Hmm... would a bot that posts the automated alerts suffice for the time being?
I had a related project in the works but making a Bluesky bot instead is totally doable. I even have an API key for WSDOT already.
Honestly anything would help right now. I didn’t use it everyday but I’m sure others would love it. I really didn’t realized how dependent I was on Twitter until I left for not just traffic info but for answering questions like “Why are there helicopters circling overhead?”
So I just wanted to let you know, I’ve been working on this on and off over the past week. I think I’ll have a proof of concept in the next couple of days and once I get that working I’d love your feedback! Surprisingly, the trickiest part is getting alerts formatted into 300-character chunks.
Same when I was living in Nova Scotia! In fact, there was a horrible wildfire in the suburbs that ripped through neighborhoods in a flash, and the most up to date, reliable info was One Guy on Twitter™. (he has a scanner and understands the calls so posts the important ones)
