This makes a lot of sense if public participation is actually desired. Links need to be short, snappy, and memorable so they're easy to either type into a smartphone on the spot or be recalled at some point later when one has a spare moment. This kind of link is also more likely to spread via word of mouth.
Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
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.
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?
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
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
Your comment adds literally nothing to this discussion. You can't form an opinion on the topic discussed because of your opinion on someones politics. Great, don't comment.
I'm not from NYC (nor do I have the same difficulty seeing past politics that gp seems to have), so I didn't research this stuff so closely. But from what I saw, it seemed that a lot of his policies seemed populist.
- Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't find much.
- State run stores are pretty bad at their jobs. Someone on here mentioned state run liquor stores as an example of where state run stores work, but in my experience, they are the opposite. I suspect that the store will work well for the first several years, while there is a lot of media attention on it, but when it falls from the foreground, the oversight will slacken and it will go the way of many other of these projects.
- I am not an expert but I suspect the wealth tax won't work the way they hope.
On the other hand, the attention that he's bringing to issues that were previously swept under the rug (like transportation) is great, and the way he energizes the populace is amazing.
Government subsidized groceries seems like something that was already solved by food stamps. Having the government run entire grocery stores at a loss seems like a worse implementation of the same thing.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
Isn't the issue a lack of grocery stores in those areas? How would food stamps help with that? The issue isn't really affordability but rather absence of stores. It might not be profitable to run a store there but that's the point of a city run store in this case.
I have my suspicions about what’s going to happen. I worry the demand is going to be too high to realistically deal with. But dammit am I excited to see someone try something a bit different to address a very obvious need.
State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.
Respectfully, maybe spend 5 minutes reading about it from the horse’s mouth. The Mamdani admin has done a pretty good job, imo, of laying out the case, and explaining the plan for these 5 grocery stores.
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.
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.
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.
This seems so amateur hour. The way the links work in this post are broken on mobile, and the first one I managed to make work was full of trivial grammatical errors.
You didn't even specify which link had the errors; 'the first one I managed to make work' is something known only to you. Complaining about a problem while not providing any hints on how to reproduce it is not a great way to win friends and influence people.
I'd like to believe that the diversity, equity, and inclusion of Scheme, Pascal, and C stdlib naming conventions here is intentional.
Traditional link shorteners only meet one of those requirements. Random strings aren't going to be remembered and the chances that they'll be mistyped is substantially higher.
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
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.
hopefully this stuff gets pushed out via email too? not enough open protocols to receive pushes from otherwise
- Rent freezes do not seem to work. When he ran on that position I did look up briefly to see if there was any recent publications that reversed the previous consensus that they don't work, but didn't find much.
- State run stores are pretty bad at their jobs. Someone on here mentioned state run liquor stores as an example of where state run stores work, but in my experience, they are the opposite. I suspect that the store will work well for the first several years, while there is a lot of media attention on it, but when it falls from the foreground, the oversight will slacken and it will go the way of many other of these projects.
- I am not an expert but I suspect the wealth tax won't work the way they hope.
On the other hand, the attention that he's bringing to issues that were previously swept under the rug (like transportation) is great, and the way he energizes the populace is amazing.
I guess it's nice for the voters who are too rich to qualify for food stamps, but in that case it would have been equivalent and simpler to just make the food stamps more universal (remove means testing).
If you really want something different to food stamps, India's subsidized canteens seem like a much more interesting idea: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/inside-indias...
State-run stores aren’t really that special. A bunch of states have state-run liquor stores. The military runs commissaries. These don’t elicit much fear-mongering or attention on cable news for some reason.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani...
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.
big tech has long canceled url on phones.