The provincial and federal gov'ts all sorts of online services fairly effectively. e.g. CRA's isn't awful, even if rudimentary -- it beats what I hear the IRS o

The provincial and federal gov'ts all sorts of online services fairly effectively. e.g. CRA's isn't awful, even if rudimentary -- it beats what I hear the IRS offers to Americans. They have hosted services all over the place and infrastructure to host. And there are, surprisingly, actually reasonably talented people inside the public sector that could run a Mastodon instance and publicize it. But direction to manage such services needs to come from the gov't and the public generally. And it's indicative of a loss of a public-sector / public-service ethic generally -- especially in North America -- that that never happens. The worst problems as I have seen them it is when the government outsources these things, puts out RFPs and the lowest cost bidder, or best connected bidder, wins and produces garbage. I've been privy to that process (homeless shelter management system / case management system for the City of Toronto) and it was depressing as hell. The EU and various European countries have already made moves into the fediverse. But this concept of offering services like this has seemingly become foreign in North America, where privatization and private public partnerships are the order of the day and people just assume that anything done by the public sector is going to be expensively run garbage.