Transit alerts are in the news
Large news outlets like CNN and The Verge have been talking a lot about transit notifications not being available on Twitter anymore. I take a deeper look at what is happening with transit from the perspective of the fediverse, and talk to a developer who has build a notification system for it.
Like most mainstream news stories about social networks these days, it started with Twitter. Twitter's decision to charge a huge sum of money for their API access that previously used to be free had a large number of downstream effects, with a signicant number of organisations giving up on using Twitter integrations altogether. One of these organisations is the MTA, the government agency for public transit in the New York region, who decided it was not worth the 500k USD a year to put automated transit alerts in a Twitter feed, and stopped publishing alerts. This led to a major news cycle with large outlets covering this, Twitter partially reversing policy, and now the MTA is officially posting on Twitter again.
The outsized focus of large news outlets such as CNN and The Verge on this surprised me. Getting all notifications, even when they are not relevant to you, mixed in with posts from your friends and other news, seems like a strange thing to put such big importance on. It felt like a good time to take a deeper look on transit alerts and social media, and zooming in on the fediverse. For this I spoke with Kona Farry, @kona, a developer who maintains the transit.alerts.social server as well as automated feeds to follow MTA transit alerts in your fediverse feeds.
Transit alerts and social media
Most transit agencies publish notices and announcements about disruption and changes to their website, as well as to an open API in a standardized format. This allows planning tools such as Google Maps to make use of the information and give you an up-to-date route planner. You can also use this to get automated posts in your (Twitter/Mastodon/Calckey/Bluesky) feed with every news alert.
@kona runs the Phantograph app as a hobby, a way to visualize transit in real time. His second project is the transit.alerts.social system, an open source ActivityPub server that federates real time alerts from a variety of transit agencies into your fediverse feeds. Pretty much all transit organisations offer free standardized API access to their data, which is what @kona uses as well.
The way people plan for transit trips is quite personal and varied, with people having quite different preferences, says @kona. Seeing notifications for delays and announcements in a microblogging feed is one of those ways, but certainly not his preferred way either. The group of people for whom this way works the best and is the most preferred might not be the biggest, for most people it's enough to know about delays only when you're actually planning the trip in your app. The variety in preference is why @kona sees a role for transit agencies in providing an official microblogging feed, and not leaving that fully to 3rd party interests: the group that is best served with feed notifications deserves to know it is official. The bonus is that it is not particularly hard to set up either.
Now that the framework is in place, expanding on the system is possible. More agencies could be added, but there is lots of design space that is still not explored. One of the first things to experiment with creating accounts for specific individual routes. That way you can get status update that cater better towards your personal commute for example, without getting all the updates of your entire region clogging up your feeds.
Experimenting with bots that post transit information is easily possible without having to run an entire server either. Stefan Bohacek has posted a tutorial on how to build your own Mastodon bot that gives you updates about the MTA as well.
You could easily adjust this to your personal preferences. Overall, it feels like the news has grabbed onto the story about the MTA transit alerts as a way to tell a larger story about the Twitter API. The specific service that is talked about is easily replaced by other bots, both on the fediverse and beyond (I've spotted at least two different MTA bots on the bluesky firehose feed. The exciting part is how people like @kona are building a framework that can be expanded upon, so that more people can get better information in exactly the way they prefer.
