29 ms·

Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government

374 points by yread 3y ago

btbuildem 3y ago
That seems like a really good idea, actually - and in line with the federated approach. A server represents some scope of authority, in this case it's the national government. If you are looking for information coming from that organization, here is the indisputable source.
izzydata 3y ago
Honestly I think this makes a lot more sense than Twitter. It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication. Whether it be a local news network, fire station, local government or the president of the United States. All on the same platform that is filled to the brim with pornography and obscenities. Of course you can curate your feed and only follow what you want, but in my mind Twitter is a single website. I'm used to dedicated forums so when Twitter rolled around I figured it would just be a little bit bigger, but still mostly informal, unofficial people goofing off online. Once everyone and everything started using it I left. I don't want to mix online identities with real life identities. So, despite Mastodon being a federated system it makes a lot more sense to use a dedicated instance for official purposes like this to me. I imagine they don't federate with anything anyway and don't even allow account creation.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Why not just use a website? What advantage do citizens get by going to a social media site to keep a pulse on govt comms?
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging platform.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now you’re asking citizens to go to two different places to seek out information instead of one. Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        They already do. Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.
        gochi 3y ago
        Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the usual methods of government officials making accounts on every network. Negating the entire original comment about how this "makes more sense than Twitter".
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        Twitter was rate limiting people and those people affected could not see government posts if they exceeded their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite reasonable. Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.
        gochi 3y ago
        None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't federated.
        SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  - izzydata 3y ago
    If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a format people can already understand and is dynamically configurable to do what they want now and could change in the future.
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the site to do website type of things, but you don't want to visit daily in case there's an update.
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and maintained by the public, i.e. the government.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
      Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly priced, compared to large org budgets https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
  - cmelbye 3y ago
    The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.
    - gochi 3y ago
      This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. I can agree with that. Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-networks-netherlands/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n... Meta rules the top 4 spots.
      - cmelbye 3y ago
        That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it. Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.
        gochi 3y ago
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push notifications / etc. A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?
    - didntcheck 3y ago
      Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem. And RSS, of course
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.
  - vanilla_nut 3y ago
    No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity. Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Wordpress for one to many.
      - heavenlyblue 3y ago
        How would your average user "follow" several wordpress websites aggregated in a single timeline?
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        RSS? I imagine ActivityPub is the Mastodon analogy.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch government's website every day to see what's going on with the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's horrible website, tho.
    - hidelooktropic 3y ago
      Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and a life workflow to check it only to approximate the aggregation feature already a first class feature of a social media platform. Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the government should use for communication. This also avoids the question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS feed.
    - DavideNL 3y ago
      Mastodon also provides an rss feed. “You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.” https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
  - DavideNL 3y ago
    It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often the agencies do also that - for presenting more static information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread". A conventional web-site is good for distributing static information whereas a social media site is good for broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more static) information.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?
  - rakoo 3y ago
    Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and discussed more easily
  - hidelooktropic 3y ago
    What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms Or rely on each website to format the messages in consistently good UX, typography, etc. Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social network concepts like hashtags Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al Or remove the ability to see conversations between government entities natively supported by @ mentions.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    I am not going to go to 41 different government agency websites every day just to see if they want to tell me something important. But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.
- vidarh 3y ago
  You can see from the fact that there are replies from other instances that they do federate. It'd make little sense not to, as if they didn't people wouldn't be able to follow them.
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    Do they federate with anybody or are they selective? Who makes those decisions, based on what? This seems like a can of worms to me.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you think there's a reason for them to be selective. The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public. I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down. [1] https://social.overheid.nl/public https://social.overheid.nl/public
      - seti0Cha 3y ago
        That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.
        nobody9999 3y ago
        >That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take. I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take." You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government. Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances. And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances. As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this? As such, please explain what you mean. Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.
- callalex 3y ago
  It terrifies me how many USA cities and counties use Twitter for their mass emergency broadcasts, since Twitter has now proven itself to be unreliable for even reads. My city pays a company (Nixle) to send out mass SMS and Email, but all it contains is a link to a tweet instead of any actionable information.
  - RF_Savage 3y ago
    That must have been frustrating when twitter went behind a login wall.
- stainablesteel 3y ago
  > It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication i've come to disagree with this now that community notes have come into play, it makes twitter the best place for them to communicate if they're trying to show their honesty and sincerity
SargeDebian 3y ago
Some relevant context: the Netherlands recently had a severe storm, for which the government sent out a Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB), which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out.
- mxuribe 3y ago
  > ...the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players... This is such a big problem where entities - and not only governments, but also other corporaate entities, and private citizens - rely far too much on the for-profit tech platforms.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  I remember saying to friends "isn't it a bit of a liability how Twitter is becoming the 'official' outlet for so many organisations, including the government?" back in like 2011 or whenever it was breaking into the mainstream. At the time there hadn't been any major controversies that I recall, so it looked like I was tilting at windmills a bit. It is nice to finally feel like I'm not the crazy person now, after a decade. Though it was quite disillusioning to see how many people wildly swung their view on whether it was a good idea to have one company controlling so much of society's discourse, based entirely on whether they agreed with the company's current leadership's politics, not on principle
- akira2501 3y ago
  > which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out. The government doesn't have a website where it can host a page and create a link? That's just lazy.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    Of course they do. But people are not trained to bookmark a slew of government pages and then figure out the right one to go to in various situations. They are, however, trained to go to Twitter and see urgent alerts collated neatly in one place.
rickette 3y ago
503, hugged to death.
- jojobaskins 3y ago
  Same, until they can handle random request spikes twitter/threads will still be necessary. Imagine if the US Govt made an official social media site, shudder...
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    >Imagine if the US Govt made an official social media site, shudder The US (and other governments) run and maintain a lot more complicated digital infrastructure, it's just that a Mastodon server like this is likely run by two interns with a Digital ocean gift card
devjab 3y ago
I’m surprised at how the EU has been sleeping on this platform. Well maybe not the EU, as the Union itself actually has a server instance for both its organisations and it’s elected officials, but the member countries. Like my own. All our politicians are on social media, but they are all on three platforms, two which are owned by two American billionaires and one which is owned by the Chinese government. All three platforms has massive privacy and democracy issues in terms of how they operate, and none of the content on them are owned by their users. Now I’m all for the EU using regulation to eventually reform something like meta into being a decent enough centralised platform. But why on earth would our institutions be on something they don’t control? With ActivityPub and Mastodon our government could run a server for all our elected officials and then it would be our country that governed what they could and could not post on there. Now, I’m not a political radical, but I do think it’s sort of silly that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can say on a social media. This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them, but the concept is just anti-democratic. The same could sort of be said about our journalists. If we had a press corps server instance, then someone posting that Tibet is a country or whatever “radical” thing you can get banned for, wouldn’t become a conflict of interest. Because they’d be allowed to write that, and our press corp genuinely couldn’t give two shits what China has to say about it.
- gsatic 3y ago
  > This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them That's why 99% don't care or will ever care about mastadon. Just like all other EU funded efforts go nowhere. Social medias main features are - broadcast, Following others broadcasts, discovering what's trending. To the general public these are already solved problems on existing platforms. The reason they jump from blog posts to twitter, or Facebook to insta or from insta to tiktok is there is a new feature available. Mastadon does nothing new that the 99% think they need. In fact the main search results and discovery is a stream of total shit compared to other platforms.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    That's why Fediverse apps are awesome, 99% of regular social media users are not there. But seriously, I believe their strengths are what will make them win in the end: - Rapid pace of development. - Focus on users instead of ads or investors. - You can become a dictator of your own instance, but no one gets to be dictator of the Fediverse. - Bad instances will get shunned by the rest. Of course, their biggest weakness if funding. So far donations can keep up with the small userbase, but the userbase will keep growing. Some popular Lemmy instances are growing at almost 100 GB per day already.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
I don't really understand this. Is this a state-operated social network for its citizens or is it a public announcements platform? Because if it's PA then going with Mastodon seems pretty excessive
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Usually the way public announcements work is that you write one post and some intermediate service posts it everywhere for you. It’s not that crazy to add a new service, and this is probably in response to Twitter getting rate limited.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    but the problem is that Mastodon is not a service. they could just as well have deployed a static website with RSS feeds. also the fact that they allow other users on the instance seems pretty strange. shouldn't the only accounts be from the government members?
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      They also have that. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss
    - tastroder 3y ago
      There are only official persons/entity accounts on that instance, if you're thinking about the global feed that's just a composition of people those accounts follow.
- epimenov 3y ago
  It makes sense really. About a week ago there was “code red” storm in the Netherlands, and first phone alarm contained something along the lines of “for more details see this Twitter account”. Then they removed any mention of twitter from from the second message.
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pphysch 3y ago
I strongly believe that you should be able to have a government-backed, federated ID. It's crazy that digital citizenship hasn't really arrived in a meaningful way (in America) and instead we have to be digital-feudal subjects of various privately-run corporations, or lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good opsec. Whether everyone must have one is an entirely different debate.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  > I strongly believe that you should be able to have a government-backed, federated ID. No thank you. This sort of thing will eventually become compelled and made into a series of regulations in the name of "safety", etc. > lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good opsec. This is a feature, not a bug. Anonymitity is extremely important for many people.
  - gochi 3y ago
    It's not an either or. More people are handling important tasks through the internet it's time we all step up and take that more seriously. We can do so without losing anonymity. Negating this won't keep you anonymous, we're already being tracked at every possible avenue with profiles created on us the second we open a website or app. We can either tackle this head on by taking ID seriously online on our terms (necessary E2EE, full ID can never be accessed, it's not stored in a central database, etc), or we can let most corporations continue to trade our profiles around for funsies while acting like our pseudonyms will protect us.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    As I said, anonymity should always be an option. But it should also be an option to engage in platforms where anonymous spammers, trolls, and criminals are not feasible, where reputation matters and some level of social integrity can be restored. And ideally without a secretive corporation exploiting your attention and data for their profits. I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies") is vastly larger than the group of people who actually need anonymity.
Sunspark 3y ago
Server threw a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" and appears to be very slow at the moment. For a government server, they sure didn't allocate much in terms of resources.
thatgerhard 3y ago
Massive alarm bells in my head for this..
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  What's next, a government with an HTTP server?
  - morkalork 3y ago
    Or worse, their own SMTP server!
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >Massive alarm bells in my head for this.. Would you care to expand on that, or should we just use our imaginnation?
- pndy 3y ago
  SargeDebian bit up there explains why they decided to deploy their Mastodon server - the reason seem pretty valid.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Yes, it is super scary that the government is trying to communicate using platforms independent of foreign social media companies. I assume you are Elon's alt?
olah_1 3y ago
This is what I always wanted to see. Municipalities running federated servers. Solves the problem of "which server do I pick" and also gives user guarantees that are tangibly bound to real entities. I think a whole nation is too big for one server of course. But some kind of breakdown based on reasonable subsidiarity would be great. In the US, maybe it would be counties. Sort of like phone numbers, you may choose to keep your original area code even after you move, or eventually maybe you update and move your account to the new server when you settle in.
whalesalad 3y ago
the IT department realizing the tiny little instance they put up as a test is now on HN
- yamazakiwi 3y ago
  This was my thought. I'm not sure government officials themselves would be able to handle using Mastodon in the same way they do twitter/etc.
  - seti0Cha 3y ago
    I don't really know how Mastodon works, but one thing I've wondered is, how does is a small instance affected by federating with a large instance? If, for example, some instance were to grow to a significant percentage of Twitter in terms of usage, does that spill over into servers that are federated with it? Or do instances only pull data by request so that it's own userbase size is the main determiner of load?
    - progval 3y ago
      Federating with other instances isn't binary: instances subscribe to individual users.
    - M2Ys4U 3y ago
      ActivityPub has the notion of a "shared inbox", so if N different accounts on alpha.example follow an account on beta.example then beta.example only has to send a single copy of a post made by that account to alpha.example rather than N copies of the same post.
- blitzar 3y ago
  Better to discover now, than when there is a population level event.
- hcks 3y ago
  Instance is down at the time of writing this. This just shows that Mastodon isn’t fit for this use case. I mean an IT department, having to manage resources, load, live traffic, just for what? A PA that will ‘benefit’ (as a gimmick) a tiny fraction of the citizens.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
who is running their server for them? In house or did they buy a mastohost or whatever? Curious if this is another thing they've thrown IT money at because someone needs to run their instance(s) now
- progval 3y ago
  Hard to tell. Server is at Hetzner (that's also where its outgoing requests are coming from, so not just a dumb reverse proxy). TLS cert is signed by QuoVadis Trustlink, so probably not mastohost (which uses Let's Encrypt).
  - landgenoot 3y ago
    Probably a freelancer. Last week, the contact info of the instance was from a very small company. https://tweakers.net/i/Hqc1sIs2fIQeo2Vu_NR-Lbllyuo=/1280x/filters:strip_icc():strip_exif()/i/2005956456.jpeg?f=imagegallery https://tweakers.net/i/Hqc1sIs2fIQeo2Vu_NR-Lbllyuo=/1280x/fi...
    - yread 3y ago
      Wow kinda surreal it's just this one guy (his LN account is linked from the litra-it.eu website) who has 4 likes on his LN post while all kinds of media ran with the story: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084964183603064833/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084964...
- tremon 3y ago
  They just (partly) answered your question: https://social.overheid.nl/@forumstandaardisatie/110706324752154417 https://social.overheid.nl/@forumstandaardisatie/11070632475... > The NL government Mastodon instance was realised by @ictu on behalf of @avhuffelen (State Secretary for Kingdom Relations and Digitalisation) And @ictu is https://www.ictu.nl/about-us# https://www.ictu.nl/about-us# > As independent consultant and executor within the government [..] ICTU’s professional field is the digital government. They don't say who is running the daily operations though. My guess is that it's run by a team within the same department (Digitalisation), not a third party.
Pxtl 3y ago
This is why I'm hopeful that Threads will federate with Mastodon instances. It just makes sense to have companies and governments and other institutions run their own private mastodon instances, and us vast unwashed people who just want a free place to read the news and shitpost to follow on a site like Threads where advertising dollars cover the costs of servers and moderation. There's no reason that eg the BBC should be posting on somebody else's infrastructure, but it's obviously of benefit to both the BBC and Threads to have Threads users to be able to follow and boost posts from BBC's staff.
- Deukhoofd 3y ago
  Hopeful? Didn't the Threads announcement literally state they were going to federate with Mastodon? > Soon, we are planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web. This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress > We’re committed to giving you more control over your audience on Threads – our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-app-text-sharing/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-ap...
  - Pxtl 3y ago
    Yes, but there's a lot of resistance in the Mastodon community about it. I know Threads is making it a goal but there's a lot that can go wrong between now and then.
    - danijelb 3y ago
      Resistance from Mastodon enthusiasts doesn't matter. Governments and companies can still decide to run their own ActivityPub infrastructure, running on Mastodon or something else. Threads and other services will federate with them, users will be able to follow accounts from those government and company instances. Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub takes off.
antimora 3y ago
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Like the EU instance, this seems only for the government? For mastodon to be successful, people need a neutral ground. People don't care to join a server for functional programming that then turns into a server for anarchism at which point they get kicked out because they're not an anarchist or the wrong kind of anarchist. Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground.
- guerrilla 3y ago
  > Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground. Quite the opposite. They're as non-neutral as anarchists except have literally the inverse positions on major issues (which they enforce with violence.) That's hardly neutral.
- danijelb 3y ago
  The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on government email servers. I think it helps if you think about Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government server, other users can interact with their content from other servers. As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology. I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics. Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification. The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.
- keskival 3y ago
  No, Mastodon instances shouldn't be neutral. They should present their colors so that other instances can more easily decide whether to federate with them or not.
sylware 3y ago
Don't forget, expect the worse when you go alternative to Big Tech: Expect Big Tech to shadow-hire teams of hackers to destroy your public servers. Namely, when going alternative to Big Tech, be sure you have real and solid "cybersecurity" teams in place. They will have to work with IAPs, datacenters, carrier transit providers, have excessive monitoring in place to detect intruders (almost military grade). Those teams will have HUGE powers, they must be limited to securing the quality and availability of the service, NO MORE.
- keskival 3y ago
  In practice this hasn't been a problem so far. While I agree the incentive is there to sabotage and corrupt, the competence doesn't seem to be.
  - sylware 3y ago
    So it is presumed that no DDOS will happen, neither stealth intrusion? My intent is not to be hurtful, but is that a bit too much naive?
swayvil 3y ago
Can anyone recommend a nice peer to peer social media thing? Hey https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/
deepakg 3y ago
The municipality of Amsterdam have been doing this (i.e. running their own Mastodon instance) as well since Jan this year: https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam
a13o 3y ago
I love this. In general, I would like to see municipalities take on more IT responsibilities. Tax-funded cloud storage and digital communications services would weaken tech companies and make accessing these table stakes features more equitable. Give libraries something to do.
ttepasse 3y ago
Something Mastodon the software needs are theme-able templates, like Wordpress/CMS themes, I think. We see more and more specialised instances by institutions, but they all have the same default look. Themes could integrate theses instances into the default corporate design while keeping the functionality the same.
- keskival 3y ago
  You can very easily fork the codebase. In fact, that's the current way to lift up the post character limit on your instance. It's not difficult to do that. In fact, if you can't do that, you probably shouldn't be running a Mastodon instance, unless for learning purposes.
_delirium 3y ago
The German federal government also operates a mastodon server, which a number of ministries and governmental organizations use: https://social.bund.de/public/local https://social.bund.de/public/local
petercammeraat 3y ago
Are there more governments and/or organisations that have their own Mastodon instance?
- M2Ys4U 3y ago
  The EU has one (social.network.europa.eu), as well as a PeerTube instance (tube.network.europa.eu). Germany has social.bund.de as well as a couple of public service broadcasters (like ZDF who run zdf.social).
- eythian 3y ago
  Gemeente Amsterdam has one: https://social.amsterdam.nl/public/local https://social.amsterdam.nl/public/local
strogonoff 3y ago
Dutch government adopting Mastodon is a notable step towards the Web of Nations.
nologic01 3y ago
Its wonderful to sense the giant wheels of technology adoption turning, even at a glacial pace. The public sector should endorse, invest in, and wherever appropriate use public goods and open source. Best success with the initiative. Dont look back, there is nothing there but greed and manipulation.
RoyGBivCap 3y ago
[dead]
boredumb 3y ago
I guess I never really took much of a liking to twitter either, but Mastodon doesn't do anything for me. I really hate big social media, but the mastodon feels like twitter and quora had an ugly baby that everyone is obligated to pretend is cute.
- OrangeMusic 3y ago
  That doesn't make much sense. Twitter is a place where people share their thoughts. Mastodon is also a place (well, places, but that's irrelevant) where people share their thoughts. Sometimes people say interesting things, sometimes not. What's your point?
dynamorando 3y ago
Could someone in Europe educate me as to why it seems (at least to me) that Europe seems to be leading in leveraging the Fediverse, along with data governance policies (the Data Act, GDPR?) versus America? I assume it's because Europe is adverse to American companies, and I assume that culture wise America will never adopt these kinds of strategies, but I'd like to hear from others on this.
vogon_laureate 3y ago
Is there not a concern that a government operated Mastodon server enables them to read the private DMs of all their users and allows other instance admins to read inter-instance DMs with government controlled servers?
- tremon 3y ago
  This is not a public instance. The only users on this instance will be government officials, and I see no problem with the government having access to the private DMs of all their spokespeople. It's actually mandated by WOB (Wet Openbaar Bestuur, i.e. FOIA) laws. But in the general case: yes. That is the same concern that a government-operated telephone network enables them to record the private conversations of all their citizens, and that every commercially-operated e-mail provider on US soil enables the government to read all mails of all users. It doesn't seem to raise much concern.
  - vogon_laureate 3y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. So users on a private instance can't DM users on a different instance, correct? Does that also mean they can't read Fediverse content from their private accounts? So it's basically a corporate intranet.
    - tremon 3y ago
      "Public instance" in this case means that the general public can't register accounts there, not that the posts themselves aren't public (that would defeat the purpose of this being a public communication platform). I'm not sure if DMs are supported cross-instance or not.
      - vogon_laureate 3y ago
        I would hope they couldn't because admins of the other instance would be able to read those DMs AFAICT.

374 points by yread 3y ago

That seems like a really good idea, actually - and in line with the federated approach. A server represents some scope of authority, in this case it's the national government. If you are looking for information coming from that organization, here is the indisputable source.

izzydata 3y ago

Honestly I think this makes a lot more sense than Twitter. It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication. Whether it be a local news network, fire station, local government or the president of the United States. All on the same platform that is filled to the brim with pornography and obscenities. Of course you can curate your feed and only follow what you want, but in my mind Twitter is a single website. I'm used to dedicated forums so when Twitter rolled around I figured it would just be a little bit bigger, but still mostly informal, unofficial people goofing off online. Once everyone and everything started using it I left. I don't want to mix online identities with real life identities. So, despite Mastodon being a federated system it makes a lot more sense to use a dedicated instance for official purposes like this to me. I imagine they don't federate with anything anyway and don't even allow account creation.

andsoitis 3y ago
Why not just use a website? What advantage do citizens get by going to a social media site to keep a pulse on govt comms?
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging platform.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now you’re asking citizens to go to two different places to seek out information instead of one. Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      They already do. Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.
      - gochi 3y ago
        Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the usual methods of government officials making accounts on every network. Negating the entire original comment about how this "makes more sense than Twitter".
        bobthepanda 3y ago
        Twitter was rate limiting people and those people affected could not see government posts if they exceeded their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite reasonable. Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.
        gochi 3y ago
        None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't federated.
        SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
- izzydata 3y ago
  If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a format people can already understand and is dynamically configurable to do what they want now and could change in the future.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the site to do website type of things, but you don't want to visit daily in case there's an update.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
  Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and maintained by the public, i.e. the government.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly priced, compared to large org budgets https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
- cmelbye 3y ago
  The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.
  - gochi 3y ago
    This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. I can agree with that. Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-networks-netherlands/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n... Meta rules the top 4 spots.
    - cmelbye 3y ago
      That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it. Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.
      - gochi 3y ago
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push notifications / etc. A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem. And RSS, of course
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.
- vanilla_nut 3y ago
  No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity. Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Wordpress for one to many.
    - heavenlyblue 3y ago
      How would your average user "follow" several wordpress websites aggregated in a single timeline?
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        RSS? I imagine ActivityPub is the Mastodon analogy.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch government's website every day to see what's going on with the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's horrible website, tho.
  - hidelooktropic 3y ago
    Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and a life workflow to check it only to approximate the aggregation feature already a first class feature of a social media platform. Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the government should use for communication. This also avoids the question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS feed.
  - DavideNL 3y ago
    Mastodon also provides an rss feed. “You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.” https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
- DavideNL 3y ago
  It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often the agencies do also that - for presenting more static information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread". A conventional web-site is good for distributing static information whereas a social media site is good for broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more static) information.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?
- rakoo 3y ago
  Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and discussed more easily
- hidelooktropic 3y ago
  What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms Or rely on each website to format the messages in consistently good UX, typography, etc. Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social network concepts like hashtags Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al Or remove the ability to see conversations between government entities natively supported by @ mentions.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  I am not going to go to 41 different government agency websites every day just to see if they want to tell me something important. But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.
vidarh 3y ago
You can see from the fact that there are replies from other instances that they do federate. It'd make little sense not to, as if they didn't people wouldn't be able to follow them.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  Do they federate with anybody or are they selective? Who makes those decisions, based on what? This seems like a can of worms to me.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you think there's a reason for them to be selective. The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public. I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down. [1] https://social.overheid.nl/public https://social.overheid.nl/public
    - seti0Cha 3y ago
      That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take.
      - nobody9999 3y ago
        >That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty normal for servers to refuse to federate with other servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced to choose which side to take. I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take." You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government. Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances. And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances. As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this? As such, please explain what you mean. Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.
callalex 3y ago
It terrifies me how many USA cities and counties use Twitter for their mass emergency broadcasts, since Twitter has now proven itself to be unreliable for even reads. My city pays a company (Nixle) to send out mass SMS and Email, but all it contains is a link to a tweet instead of any actionable information.
- RF_Savage 3y ago
  That must have been frustrating when twitter went behind a login wall.
stainablesteel 3y ago
> It always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything resembling official communication i've come to disagree with this now that community notes have come into play, it makes twitter the best place for them to communicate if they're trying to show their honesty and sincerity

SargeDebian 3y ago

Some relevant context: the Netherlands recently had a severe storm, for which the government sent out a Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB), which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out.

mxuribe 3y ago
> ...the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players... This is such a big problem where entities - and not only governments, but also other corporaate entities, and private citizens - rely far too much on the for-profit tech platforms.
didntcheck 3y ago
I remember saying to friends "isn't it a bit of a liability how Twitter is becoming the 'official' outlet for so many organisations, including the government?" back in like 2011 or whenever it was breaking into the mainstream. At the time there hadn't been any major controversies that I recall, so it looked like I was tilting at windmills a bit. It is nice to finally feel like I'm not the crazy person now, after a decade. Though it was quite disillusioning to see how many people wildly swung their view on whether it was a good idea to have one company controlling so much of society's discourse, based entirely on whether they agreed with the company's current leadership's politics, not on principle
akira2501 3y ago
> which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out. The government doesn't have a website where it can host a page and create a link? That's just lazy.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  Of course they do. But people are not trained to bookmark a slew of government pages and then figure out the right one to go to in various situations. They are, however, trained to go to Twitter and see urgent alerts collated neatly in one place.

rickette 3y ago

503, hugged to death.

jojobaskins 3y ago
Same, until they can handle random request spikes twitter/threads will still be necessary. Imagine if the US Govt made an official social media site, shudder...
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >Imagine if the US Govt made an official social media site, shudder The US (and other governments) run and maintain a lot more complicated digital infrastructure, it's just that a Mastodon server like this is likely run by two interns with a Digital ocean gift card

devjab 3y ago

I’m surprised at how the EU has been sleeping on this platform. Well maybe not the EU, as the Union itself actually has a server instance for both its organisations and it’s elected officials, but the member countries. Like my own. All our politicians are on social media, but they are all on three platforms, two which are owned by two American billionaires and one which is owned by the Chinese government. All three platforms has massive privacy and democracy issues in terms of how they operate, and none of the content on them are owned by their users. Now I’m all for the EU using regulation to eventually reform something like meta into being a decent enough centralised platform. But why on earth would our institutions be on something they don’t control? With ActivityPub and Mastodon our government could run a server for all our elected officials and then it would be our country that governed what they could and could not post on there. Now, I’m not a political radical, but I do think it’s sort of silly that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can say on a social media. This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them, but the concept is just anti-democratic. The same could sort of be said about our journalists. If we had a press corps server instance, then someone posting that Tibet is a country or whatever “radical” thing you can get banned for, wouldn’t become a conflict of interest. Because they’d be allowed to write that, and our press corp genuinely couldn’t give two shits what China has to say about it.

gsatic 3y ago
> This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them That's why 99% don't care or will ever care about mastadon. Just like all other EU funded efforts go nowhere. Social medias main features are - broadcast, Following others broadcasts, discovering what's trending. To the general public these are already solved problems on existing platforms. The reason they jump from blog posts to twitter, or Facebook to insta or from insta to tiktok is there is a new feature available. Mastadon does nothing new that the 99% think they need. In fact the main search results and discovery is a stream of total shit compared to other platforms.
- ASalazarMX 3y ago
  That's why Fediverse apps are awesome, 99% of regular social media users are not there. But seriously, I believe their strengths are what will make them win in the end: - Rapid pace of development. - Focus on users instead of ads or investors. - You can become a dictator of your own instance, but no one gets to be dictator of the Fediverse. - Bad instances will get shunned by the rest. Of course, their biggest weakness if funding. So far donations can keep up with the small userbase, but the userbase will keep growing. Some popular Lemmy instances are growing at almost 100 GB per day already.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

I don't really understand this. Is this a state-operated social network for its citizens or is it a public announcements platform? Because if it's PA then going with Mastodon seems pretty excessive

bobthepanda 3y ago
Usually the way public announcements work is that you write one post and some intermediate service posts it everywhere for you. It’s not that crazy to add a new service, and this is probably in response to Twitter getting rate limited.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  but the problem is that Mastodon is not a service. they could just as well have deployed a static website with RSS feeds. also the fact that they allow other users on the instance seems pretty strange. shouldn't the only accounts be from the government members?
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    They also have that. https://www.government.nl/rss https://www.government.nl/rss
  - tastroder 3y ago
    There are only official persons/entity accounts on that instance, if you're thinking about the global feed that's just a composition of people those accounts follow.
epimenov 3y ago
It makes sense really. About a week ago there was “code red” storm in the Netherlands, and first phone alarm contained something along the lines of “for more details see this Twitter account”. Then they removed any mention of twitter from from the second message.
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pphysch 3y ago

I strongly believe that you should be able to have a government-backed, federated ID. It's crazy that digital citizenship hasn't really arrived in a meaningful way (in America) and instead we have to be digital-feudal subjects of various privately-run corporations, or lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good opsec. Whether everyone must have one is an entirely different debate.

nemo44x 3y ago
> I strongly believe that you should be able to have a government-backed, federated ID. No thank you. This sort of thing will eventually become compelled and made into a series of regulations in the name of "safety", etc. > lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good opsec. This is a feature, not a bug. Anonymitity is extremely important for many people.
- gochi 3y ago
  It's not an either or. More people are handling important tasks through the internet it's time we all step up and take that more seriously. We can do so without losing anonymity. Negating this won't keep you anonymous, we're already being tracked at every possible avenue with profiles created on us the second we open a website or app. We can either tackle this head on by taking ID seriously online on our terms (necessary E2EE, full ID can never be accessed, it's not stored in a central database, etc), or we can let most corporations continue to trade our profiles around for funsies while acting like our pseudonyms will protect us.
- pphysch 3y ago
  As I said, anonymity should always be an option. But it should also be an option to engage in platforms where anonymous spammers, trolls, and criminals are not feasible, where reputation matters and some level of social integrity can be restored. And ideally without a secretive corporation exploiting your attention and data for their profits. I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies") is vastly larger than the group of people who actually need anonymity.

Sunspark 3y ago

Server threw a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" and appears to be very slow at the moment. For a government server, they sure didn't allocate much in terms of resources.

thatgerhard 3y ago

Massive alarm bells in my head for this..

BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
What's next, a government with an HTTP server?
- morkalork 3y ago
  Or worse, their own SMTP server!
nobody9999 3y ago
>Massive alarm bells in my head for this.. Would you care to expand on that, or should we just use our imaginnation?
pndy 3y ago
SargeDebian bit up there explains why they decided to deploy their Mastodon server - the reason seem pretty valid.
nerdbert 3y ago
Yes, it is super scary that the government is trying to communicate using platforms independent of foreign social media companies. I assume you are Elon's alt?

olah_1 3y ago

This is what I always wanted to see. Municipalities running federated servers. Solves the problem of "which server do I pick" and also gives user guarantees that are tangibly bound to real entities. I think a whole nation is too big for one server of course. But some kind of breakdown based on reasonable subsidiarity would be great. In the US, maybe it would be counties. Sort of like phone numbers, you may choose to keep your original area code even after you move, or eventually maybe you update and move your account to the new server when you settle in.

whalesalad 3y ago

the IT department realizing the tiny little instance they put up as a test is now on HN

yamazakiwi 3y ago
This was my thought. I'm not sure government officials themselves would be able to handle using Mastodon in the same way they do twitter/etc.
- seti0Cha 3y ago
  I don't really know how Mastodon works, but one thing I've wondered is, how does is a small instance affected by federating with a large instance? If, for example, some instance were to grow to a significant percentage of Twitter in terms of usage, does that spill over into servers that are federated with it? Or do instances only pull data by request so that it's own userbase size is the main determiner of load?
  - progval 3y ago
    Federating with other instances isn't binary: instances subscribe to individual users.
  - M2Ys4U 3y ago
    ActivityPub has the notion of a "shared inbox", so if N different accounts on alpha.example follow an account on beta.example then beta.example only has to send a single copy of a post made by that account to alpha.example rather than N copies of the same post.
blitzar 3y ago
Better to discover now, than when there is a population level event.
hcks 3y ago
Instance is down at the time of writing this. This just shows that Mastodon isn’t fit for this use case. I mean an IT department, having to manage resources, load, live traffic, just for what? A PA that will ‘benefit’ (as a gimmick) a tiny fraction of the citizens.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

who is running their server for them? In house or did they buy a mastohost or whatever? Curious if this is another thing they've thrown IT money at because someone needs to run their instance(s) now

progval 3y ago
Hard to tell. Server is at Hetzner (that's also where its outgoing requests are coming from, so not just a dumb reverse proxy). TLS cert is signed by QuoVadis Trustlink, so probably not mastohost (which uses Let's Encrypt).
- landgenoot 3y ago
  Probably a freelancer. Last week, the contact info of the instance was from a very small company. https://tweakers.net/i/Hqc1sIs2fIQeo2Vu_NR-Lbllyuo=/1280x/filters:strip_icc():strip_exif()/i/2005956456.jpeg?f=imagegallery https://tweakers.net/i/Hqc1sIs2fIQeo2Vu_NR-Lbllyuo=/1280x/fi...
  - yread 3y ago
    Wow kinda surreal it's just this one guy (his LN account is linked from the litra-it.eu website) who has 4 likes on his LN post while all kinds of media ran with the story: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084964183603064833/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084964...
tremon 3y ago
They just (partly) answered your question: https://social.overheid.nl/@forumstandaardisatie/110706324752154417 https://social.overheid.nl/@forumstandaardisatie/11070632475... > The NL government Mastodon instance was realised by @ictu on behalf of @avhuffelen (State Secretary for Kingdom Relations and Digitalisation) And @ictu is https://www.ictu.nl/about-us# https://www.ictu.nl/about-us# > As independent consultant and executor within the government [..] ICTU’s professional field is the digital government. They don't say who is running the daily operations though. My guess is that it's run by a team within the same department (Digitalisation), not a third party.

Pxtl 3y ago

This is why I'm hopeful that Threads will federate with Mastodon instances. It just makes sense to have companies and governments and other institutions run their own private mastodon instances, and us vast unwashed people who just want a free place to read the news and shitpost to follow on a site like Threads where advertising dollars cover the costs of servers and moderation. There's no reason that eg the BBC should be posting on somebody else's infrastructure, but it's obviously of benefit to both the BBC and Threads to have Threads users to be able to follow and boost posts from BBC's staff.

Deukhoofd 3y ago
Hopeful? Didn't the Threads announcement literally state they were going to federate with Mastodon? > Soon, we are planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web. This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress > We’re committed to giving you more control over your audience on Threads – our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-app-text-sharing/ https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-ap...
- Pxtl 3y ago
  Yes, but there's a lot of resistance in the Mastodon community about it. I know Threads is making it a goal but there's a lot that can go wrong between now and then.
  - danijelb 3y ago
    Resistance from Mastodon enthusiasts doesn't matter. Governments and companies can still decide to run their own ActivityPub infrastructure, running on Mastodon or something else. Threads and other services will federate with them, users will be able to follow accounts from those government and company instances. Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub takes off.

antimora 3y ago

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Like the EU instance, this seems only for the government? For mastodon to be successful, people need a neutral ground. People don't care to join a server for functional programming that then turns into a server for anarchism at which point they get kicked out because they're not an anarchist or the wrong kind of anarchist. Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground.

guerrilla 3y ago
> Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground. Quite the opposite. They're as non-neutral as anarchists except have literally the inverse positions on major issues (which they enforce with violence.) That's hardly neutral.
danijelb 3y ago
The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on government email servers. I think it helps if you think about Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government server, other users can interact with their content from other servers. As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology. I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics. Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification. The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.
keskival 3y ago
No, Mastodon instances shouldn't be neutral. They should present their colors so that other instances can more easily decide whether to federate with them or not.

sylware 3y ago

Don't forget, expect the worse when you go alternative to Big Tech: Expect Big Tech to shadow-hire teams of hackers to destroy your public servers. Namely, when going alternative to Big Tech, be sure you have real and solid "cybersecurity" teams in place. They will have to work with IAPs, datacenters, carrier transit providers, have excessive monitoring in place to detect intruders (almost military grade). Those teams will have HUGE powers, they must be limited to securing the quality and availability of the service, NO MORE.

keskival 3y ago
In practice this hasn't been a problem so far. While I agree the incentive is there to sabotage and corrupt, the competence doesn't seem to be.
- sylware 3y ago
  So it is presumed that no DDOS will happen, neither stealth intrusion? My intent is not to be hurtful, but is that a bit too much naive?

swayvil 3y ago

Can anyone recommend a nice peer to peer social media thing? Hey https://getaether.net/ https://getaether.net/

deepakg 3y ago

The municipality of Amsterdam have been doing this (i.e. running their own Mastodon instance) as well since Jan this year: https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam

a13o 3y ago

I love this. In general, I would like to see municipalities take on more IT responsibilities. Tax-funded cloud storage and digital communications services would weaken tech companies and make accessing these table stakes features more equitable. Give libraries something to do.

ttepasse 3y ago

Something Mastodon the software needs are theme-able templates, like Wordpress/CMS themes, I think. We see more and more specialised instances by institutions, but they all have the same default look. Themes could integrate theses instances into the default corporate design while keeping the functionality the same.

keskival 3y ago
You can very easily fork the codebase. In fact, that's the current way to lift up the post character limit on your instance. It's not difficult to do that. In fact, if you can't do that, you probably shouldn't be running a Mastodon instance, unless for learning purposes.

_delirium 3y ago

The German federal government also operates a mastodon server, which a number of ministries and governmental organizations use: https://social.bund.de/public/local https://social.bund.de/public/local

petercammeraat 3y ago

Are there more governments and/or organisations that have their own Mastodon instance?

M2Ys4U 3y ago
The EU has one (social.network.europa.eu), as well as a PeerTube instance (tube.network.europa.eu). Germany has social.bund.de as well as a couple of public service broadcasters (like ZDF who run zdf.social).
eythian 3y ago
Gemeente Amsterdam has one: https://social.amsterdam.nl/public/local https://social.amsterdam.nl/public/local

strogonoff 3y ago

Dutch government adopting Mastodon is a notable step towards the Web of Nations.

nologic01 3y ago

Its wonderful to sense the giant wheels of technology adoption turning, even at a glacial pace. The public sector should endorse, invest in, and wherever appropriate use public goods and open source. Best success with the initiative. Dont look back, there is nothing there but greed and manipulation.

RoyGBivCap 3y ago

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boredumb 3y ago

I guess I never really took much of a liking to twitter either, but Mastodon doesn't do anything for me. I really hate big social media, but the mastodon feels like twitter and quora had an ugly baby that everyone is obligated to pretend is cute.

OrangeMusic 3y ago
That doesn't make much sense. Twitter is a place where people share their thoughts. Mastodon is also a place (well, places, but that's irrelevant) where people share their thoughts. Sometimes people say interesting things, sometimes not. What's your point?

dynamorando 3y ago

Could someone in Europe educate me as to why it seems (at least to me) that Europe seems to be leading in leveraging the Fediverse, along with data governance policies (the Data Act, GDPR?) versus America? I assume it's because Europe is adverse to American companies, and I assume that culture wise America will never adopt these kinds of strategies, but I'd like to hear from others on this.

vogon_laureate 3y ago

Is there not a concern that a government operated Mastodon server enables them to read the private DMs of all their users and allows other instance admins to read inter-instance DMs with government controlled servers?

tremon 3y ago
This is not a public instance. The only users on this instance will be government officials, and I see no problem with the government having access to the private DMs of all their spokespeople. It's actually mandated by WOB (Wet Openbaar Bestuur, i.e. FOIA) laws. But in the general case: yes. That is the same concern that a government-operated telephone network enables them to record the private conversations of all their citizens, and that every commercially-operated e-mail provider on US soil enables the government to read all mails of all users. It doesn't seem to raise much concern.
- vogon_laureate 3y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. So users on a private instance can't DM users on a different instance, correct? Does that also mean they can't read Fediverse content from their private accounts? So it's basically a corporate intranet.
  - tremon 3y ago
    "Public instance" in this case means that the general public can't register accounts there, not that the posts themselves aren't public (that would defeat the purpose of this being a public communication platform). I'm not sure if DMs are supported cross-instance or not.
    - vogon_laureate 3y ago
      I would hope they couldn't because admins of the other instance would be able to read those DMs AFAICT.