Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass
Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure
Oh yeah, I totally agree with you that governments should at least host their own Mastodon instances. I thought it was weird when Twitter became the go to for communication from the US Government.