I hope other governments, small and large, start doing this.
Germany (social.bund.de) and the EU (social.network.europa.eu) already have it. I think it’s very likely that other governments, especially european ones, will start to do this.
With the internet being so dominated by american voices, I dont think a lot of people have fully appreciated the sentiment change in the higher levels of european governments. Sovereign control over their digital spaces is something that is actually mattering on the level of nation states. Its a way of thinking that is kind of new to most people, as we rarely think about the sovereign powers of nation states, and even less so in the context of the internet. But now were starting to do that again, and it actually matters.
With the internet being so dominated by american voices, I dont think a lot of people have fully appreciated the sentiment change in the higher levels of european governments.
Absolutely. I was on an instance, run by North Americans, that had blocked European Govt instances because they didn’t trust government agencies spying on them etc. Some German users picked up on this and voiced a lot of frustration over it. There was a clear cultural divide. Even more ironic, I think it was the German department of privacy or something to that effect.
Nonetheless, it was quite interesting to see a tension between the small hacker aspect of the fediverse and the “this is the new internet” aspect and how much the US dominated perspective probably completely missed the mark.
EDIT: European Govt from “European” to clarify I was referring to government run instances.
How does federating two public instances enable spying
Well it was reflexive choice I think. American anti government sentiment without thinking through whether the instance or government department in question was providing a service that some would benefit from on the fediverse.
ha yeah I remember that, that was fun.
To riff on this a little bit further: its also visible in how little attention in the gazillion conversations about Threads is paid to the fact that the entirety of the EU cannot even access it yet due to the new DMA and DSA.
Or one of the articles I wrote that got relatively low traction, that was specificially about how all of the Nordic countries got an official recommendation to use ActivityPub for their governmental communications. I dont mind that some articles get less traction than others, but it does stand out when you consider how impactful such things are for the long term structure of the fediverse. Lots of EU governments are now talking about needing sovereign public digital spaces, and are actively looking how ActivityPub can help with that. And that matters way more than whatever Elons latest shenanigans are.
In a way, this gives me hope that the fediverse might actually survive in a way bigger capacity than XMPP did even if Threads/Meta manages to EEE a large part of the fediverse.
ha yeah I remember that, that was fun.
Hey! I was trying to be vague and anonymous!! 😅
But yea … totally with you!!
For those that don’t know, this person is the author of https://fediversereport.com/ and posts here like this.
@[email protected] … you could add more links and what not to your bio here … ?
ARD and ZDF too, probably just as significant because they’re some of the biggest media organisations in the world: https://ard.social/explore and https://zdf.social/about
With the internet being so dominated by american voices,
Europe has to build something new that isn’t a big corp, that isn’t centralized. It has to find its own way, and the Fediverse model is a good beginning. It’s to show we can do something but in the European spirit.
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Why not have a state-run instance on an open platform? It’s better than relying on a corporation’s platform. The government is ‘the people’ more than corporations are.
Exactly this. In the same way I expect to be able to email the government, but I wouldn’t expect to send them a message on Facebook Messenger.
Open platforms over walled gardens.
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Surveillance? In what sense, here in particular. A bit confused. Also, it depends on the kind of private instance you mean, since this is private too, in the sense you cannot make accounts on it. What other benefit do they gain over people, using this over a corporate website?
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Again, what can they tap or see into that they couldn’t before? All info on the other servers is public, that would be true for any federated server. I really don’t get how they’d get any more access to your data than another random person on the internet seeing your profile. They’re not making their own instance available to make accounts on, or enable users to post on it directly. You aren’t giving them any more details than you would if you had a Twitter account that was public. It is quite literally just for official government information dissemination without being locked behind rate limits.
Why would a government subject itself to potential censorship of whatever admin is running their instance? It makes perfect sense for a government to host their own instance from where they can freely broadcast announcements.
And the free market has proven to be unreliable. You’re subject to whatever billionaire is ego-tripping at the top of whatever platform you’re using. The will of the people is nowhere to be seen.
It’s like saying government officers should use gmail accounts instead of writing their emails from their own government-run email servers.
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So Lemmy and Mastodon instances are free market solutions, unless a government does it? I don’t even understand what your point is.
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would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people
you mean like facebook? haha!
imo mastadon wont suddenly become “state-run media” just because Goverment instances exist.
there are .gov email adresses already, and emails are pretty far from state-run.
since there is (afaik) no verification on mastadon, ill assume that theyll use the goverment instances to prove that @official@goverment is legit.
True free market solutions inevitably lead to the people abiding by the rules of the rich and powerful.
Anything run by the government has to at the very least PRETEND to listen to people who don’t have a financial interest in the enshittification of every part of society.
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You mean fair, not free. The only way to avoid the tyranny of the powerful is regulation restricting their freedom to abuse their powers.
THAT’S what the government is supposed to do to a market: help the small to regular sized fish and cooperation between them by, amongst other things, erecting fences keeping off the sharks that would otherwise immediately eat them.
Also stuff with plants, I guess, but this ocean analogy is probably long and complicated enough already 😂
This isn’t that though. Running a federated service instance is more akin to them having to abide by the rule of the people than the status quo where Musk or Zuck could boot them from their platform or hide anything they don’t like without any reason at all.
In the fediverse, they’re choosing to run a self-hosted outlet that can interact with other privately or publicly run services. It’s like them choosing to run their own email servers instead of their officials all using gmail accounts.
The free market solutions have just led to unelected billionaire oligarchs controlling the narrative. With this federated stuff, no single entity can control the narrative (once all the kinks are ironed out like vote manipulation, exploits, etc)
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in the future:
“Ireland.ir and Scot.land has defederated from the England.UK.gov. The Prime minister will be addressing his Instance shortly”
This is great. This is how it always should have been.
Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.
You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you. Well, small unprofessional companies do, but everyone else has a domain, website, mail server and all the usual internet infrastructure in place. Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance. For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.
Eh, lots of companies use gmail it’s just masked by being their own domain and part of g suite.
tons of large companies use gmail lol
They’ve done a lot of stupid things lately, but this isn’t one of them.
Governments should be using open platforms and open source software.
Absolutely! Using open source software is much cheaper, as well. Hiring developers to work on open source software/OSs would cost less than buying software annually. Governments pay stupid amounts of money for easily replaceable software.
Why. So they become less secure? Propriatery software has its uses /s
Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can’t spy on people and insert ads?!!!!!!!1111
This is great.
I really wish more news sites set up their own instances. At the start I realize they wouldn’t be getting as many eyeballs, but it seems to make a lot of sense to have a @[email protected] or something. Then Wolf could have @[email protected].
Instant “verification” that way, too.
But we’ll see.
Given how the fediverse is kinda like e-mail, this feels like a natural next step.
Wow. Decentralization as a whole will be a game changer for all corners of media, science etc.
I had the same exact thoughts when the first twitter migration happened. I doubt we will see it, but I can dream.
Does CNN already own that domain?
For some crazy reason they haven’t snatched it up yet. Atleast a domain seller website is saying it is free for pickings, if you want it.
Then again maybe their policy is to put everything as subdomain on cnn.com and make cnn.com their sole brand “if it’s not on cnn.com, it’s not that CNN”. Still i would have though they defensive register all relevant TLDs, even if they never ever use them.
I don’t remember which pizza chain (or it has since been fixed) but something like
papajohns.pizzaused to redirect todominos.com.
I have no idea. That’s just an example.
Ah, okay, it would make more sense to say something like
social.cnn.comsince they already own and usecnn.com.
The only way they would do that is if they could monetize it somehow.
It’d be another method to drive traffic to their websites and gain more ad revenue. Same as maintaining a presence on twitter or facebook, or providing an RSS feed.
Yeah totally.
I had the thought that since Threads “doesn’t want politics” on their platform, and Twitter is trash, maaaaybe activity pub could be a thing.
But you are right: they won’t do anything if it won’t make money.
Isn’t their entire strategy to fish people onto their site, make money that way? Twitter doesn’t pay them either.
Agreed, not sure how I feel about governments setting up their own servers, but news organizations definitely.
How would you propose government officials officially distribute verified information? Just for government officials and distribution, that’s the whole point of having a .gov domain is so you can know it’s official
Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.
This is really fascinating to me. It would be interesting to see each country set up their own Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/other federated systems and have those instances constantly talk to each other. Like others have commented, It seems like a great way to keep the communication style and interaction of twitter/facebook, while also protecting the validity of the information through private instances. Really smart decision.
I’d be interested to see other organisations get involved too. For instance, instead of every news website having their own comments section, why not set up a Lemmy instance? They could post links to their articles and users can comment with their Fediverse account, posting could be limited to users from that server, and sign-up could be restricted to people who work there.
There are a lot of ways they could handle it. Imagine the New York Times or similar organizations with their own customized Mastodon for live updates and Lemmy for linking to articles and for searching. Mastodon being the free to follow and the Lemmy/main site being subscription to make an account and comment.
Its super important that Government info NOT be hidden behind paywalls, forced log-ins or even CloudFlare puzzles. People need to be able to freely click through to the official information.
This is the way. Government, Businesses, Celebrities and News organizations should be hosting their own social media presence. They shouldn’t be beholden to corporate interests to regulate their communications. This also breaks the cycle of exclusive content that causes lock-in. Wins for everyone.
Imagine a world where every government has its own instance.
“Breaking News: North Korea has defederated from the United States, as well as hundreds of other countries.”
“The Russian federation defederated Ukraine.”
You claim to be a federation, yet you’ve shown that you are actually a defederation.
More like it tried to forcibly merge the instances
Denies there is such a thing as a Ukrainian instance.
“The Russian federation defederates itself.”
Wow, I never thought about this, but this is probably pretty good to have right? Might be a good way to find info about something if their sites are really confusing etc possibly
I tried to start a Mastodon account, but I got the error message “Validation failed: time zone not included in list”
Soo… you’re located on Mars?
Italy will follow soon 🤥
And all other EU countries. Then crimew.gay will defederate them all later.
Damn a government that actually do something in terms of digitilization.
Cries in German …
It’s weird that you use Germany as an example when Germany has been on Mastodon since 2020 at https://social.bund.de!
Excellent use case.
Good, other governments should be doing this. (But even if they use threads instead, mastodon users’ll see their updates anyway if mastodon feds with it)
threads will never federate.
You think it was just a fake promise? I haven’t thought about it, but it’s certainly possible.
I think it was posturing to the countries that banned Twitter.
look, you get your own Threads in Iran.
