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.
As someone who has contributed to the Fediverse, I can assure you the EU hasn't been sleeping on this and has helped many other projects (not just Mastodon) through funding.
Really, if anything, they've helped a lot of folks sustaining their contributions.
To give a specific example, the EU has a funding programme called NGI to support 'next generation internet' projects. Some (all?) of this money is distributed through a small organisation called NLNet, who have decided to support a number of Fediverse projects:
I love love love the concept of federated social media. The onboarding experience though. Just signed up at pixelfed.social, installed the Android app, try to log in and ... nothing happens?!? No error, nothing.
You are not being "onboarded" - they are not a business and you are not a customer (or an employee).
Which may also explain the additional friction - sounds like you encountered a bug, or else the instance was just temporarily having issues. If the problem persists I would suggest filing an issue (assuming you are using an open source app).
You won't love federated social media as much when you discover that the moderators can be very arbitrary and authoritarian. Each instance is their own private kingdom where they rule without accountability.
From what I understand this is not about forcing individuals to use one platform it another, but rather about what the official instances themselves use. And I very definitely think the people can and should force the EU to switch away from platforms like Twitter
They can encourage it though. They can mandate that all their government officials use Mastodon as their official communication channel. If you want the latest news from the government or want to communicate with government officials that’s the only channel.
> But why on earth would our institutions be on something they don’t control?
I imagine is because they think their message will reach more people on Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok than on Mastodon.
The fix for this would be for the EU to mandate that Twitter and Facebook federate using ActivityPub, in such a way that following a Mastodon (etc) account gives that account as much reach as an account directly on Twitter/Facebook would have.
As for TikTok, since it's a massive national security risk it should just be blocked.
> 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 is only possible because your elected officials don't have the balls to tell Meta to do the right thing.
>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.
Actually that kinda IS democratic. The government can't just do whatever the hell it wants. that would be undemocratic.
The fact an external for-profit company in another country can limit what your politicians says however is a bit weird. But seeing as, generally, they won't have vested interest in Dutch affairs, maybe they're actually better than an internal entitity that may have a vested interest?
The EU has been sleeping so much on this that they started their own instance quite some time ago and actively communicate with the fedizens ;) https://social.network.europa.eu
Who's citizens (or subjects some might say) are they really, if congregation and discourse isn't happening on public "property" (in the digital sense of the word)?
Facebook might have several billion users but it will never be a sovereign nation and even if they were to start calling their users “citizens” tomorrow, it would hold no weight under any internationally recognized standard or the laws of nations.
Sovereign nations and corporations are entirely different types of entity with virtually no overlap in real power, so you’re just muddying the waters to even imply otherwise. Even historically powerful corporations like the British East India Company found the basis for their authority in a nation which eventually revoked their authority, assumed its debts and obligations, and took possession of their armed forces, equipment, claimed lands and authority and disestablished the corporation.
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.
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.
I remember when we talked about Reddit the same way. We’ll see if it lasts. I say this as someone who uses Kbin in particular a lot. I like it now but we’ve been down this road so many times. It’s hard not be skeptical.
They also need to make the relationship between these different apps and how it all works easier to digest. And some quality 3PA’s to fill in the gaps. I think Sync has plans to point at Lemmy so here’s hoping we see that soon!
You mean third-party apps? The passion with which developers have been working on Fediverse apps lately is humbling. On iOS, the ugly child of open source apps, just for Lemmy there's Memmy, and in TestFlight, Mlem, Thunder, and LiftOff!. These last are still beta/alpha, but Memmy is mature enough to compare with the former third-party Reddit clients.
The official Mastodon app recently got a much needed upgrade, and there are other good clients like MetaText, Ivory, and many more. If anything, there are too many choices now, the dust needs to settle.
It's refreshing to see a fundamental questioning of the status quo (corporate lordship), and a disrupting and viable technology (Fediverse) making strides in the right direction.
I might be biased because I remember a diverse Internet from before the corporate takeovers, and it seems like the Fediverse is attracting older adults who got to experience some of that diversity too: https://mastodon.art/@jsstaedtler/110668308409683502
Like I said, I am regularly on Kbin now. I like the fediverse concept as well. I’m just somewhat jaded because like you I remember and enjoyed the more “diverse” internet, warts and all. Being a bit cynical doesn’t mean I think it’s doomed.
This features decreased for those platforms recently - since they are becoming walled gardens.
That is why for example Slovak railway company switched from Twitter to Mastodon this month. More people are on Twitter, but that does not matter for some forms of broadcasting, when anyone can view content on Mastodon.
Then have a rule that the any elected member of the current house(s) can have an account. Moderation actions on those members should be rare, public, and conducted on the authority of the Speaker (or sensible equivalent for the political system). Whether the posts should enjoy parliamentary privilege, and/or be constrained by the rules of "unparliamentary language", is a detail that would need working out
Of course this has the downside of losing your account if you lose your seat, and not getting one until you're elected, but hopefully this will nudge political parties to run their own instances for their members
The above would presumably not apply to other accounts like the press accounts of a government department. I think they/the acting government can police themselves, as they currently do with Twitter, and as they've done with statements to the press since before computers
Why? It was his company to begin with. Nobody forced anyone to buy the stock. Everyone buying the stock willingly accepts that Zuck is the King of Facebook.
We should have more stringent laws regarding the form of corporate governance. When ownership stakes are sold with profit stakes, it creates more sustainable enterprise with aligned values.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads. Which kind of illuminates my point, for this to become standard we need far better implementation details than what activitypub currently describes. Until that happens, this is just another "social network" to join and keep up with, or ignoring it entirely to rely on some other social network.
> Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads.
I think that's a misunderstanding or two. An Instagram/Threads account is one potential way "to follow the Dutch government" - actually this is hypothetical, as the threads/mastodon interop is also hypothetical at present, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36669480 .
An account on any public mastodon server is a second way to follow the Dutch government, and should work today much better than the first way. it doesn't need to be "on threads".
GETing the correct rss feed url on their mastodon server is a third way. You don't even need a mastodon account or any other account, but you have to "pull" the content, it's not pushed to your feed.
Finding out which other social media they broadcast to and following them there is possibly a fourth way.
> This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks.
The social media department of any large org would have active accounts on all of the social media in order to get a message out. That's how it is already, not sure what your objection to mastodon, where they own the instance, is.
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.
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
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.
You can ask citizens to go to your website to stay informed, but they will turn around and complain that nobody told them about X,Y,Z because they're not naturally going to the website on a regular basis unless they have an immediate need. Elected officials will turn on you and blame you for not meeting the citizens where they already are.
Well, usually governments don't just have one website. Different entities use different channels for official communications + Twitter which is the one everyone reads. Why not have a governments official mastodon for the governments official communication interoperable with the network everyone else is on?
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".
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.
"They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that they don't control and can't rely on"
They can however control a Mastodon instance, and starting one is a off-the-shelf operation now.
Another poster described it as "problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out" which is exactly right. Those other platforms might have decided today not to show you the emergency warning unless you have an account and are logged in and have watched some ads first.
It is - for good reason - conventional wisdom that in order to get a message out thoroughly, you have "outposts" on _all_ the media that you don't own (including Facebook and twitter) and push content to there, but the "home base" is not on some platform where it can be locked, rate-limited or taken from you at the whim of some other company in some other country.
I think the more pressing thing is that they want to get anyone affected by Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar type of service. I’m sure they’re evaluating Threads as we speak.
People go to a gov website when they know they need to get information or get something done. Social media is a way to push information out about new policies etc.
Governments have whole departments dedicated to getting the word out about things because people aren't all in one place. This is not a big additional effort but it is different in two essential way: They control it, and it has APIs anyone can connect to, including to bridge elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable
In my mind, the worst case scenario is what we have for e-mail: 99% of Mastodon traffic might become spam. Maybe it's easier to control because Mastodon is a subscription model rather than a targeting model (the recipient is in control of what to receive, not the sender), but you only need one user on an instance to subscribe to a spam instance, and the local feed will be inundated. And that's manageable as long as that happens once or twice a day, but the same incentives that almost destroyed e-mail are still there for Mastodon.
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.
>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?
The issue is that if they're selective they'll prevent Dutch citizens from following government accounts. Most places it'd be deeply problematic if the government started blocking access for constituents without good reason.
They can (and probably should) only show their federated feed to users of their instance, and they can silence other instances to prevent posts from making it into their federated feed even if someone follows accounts there, but defederation would likely be an extreme last resort for a government server.
> 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
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.
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
> ...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.
> 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.
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.
The government sent out a message with an embedded link to Twitter. It sounds to me like the government can choose whatever link it likes and that in this case they unaccountably chose twitter.
I doubt the assertion that even a simple majority of people are "trained to go to Twitter" for urgent alerts, or that even if true, this would justify the government using them as the default platform to link to in their own government created alert messages.
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.
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.
The EU/EEA has eIDAS which requires providers to recognise electronic IDs issued across the EEA to some extent.
Since I'm in the UK (grumblegrumble Brexit) I haven't kept up that much despite being a Norwegian citizen, but in some countries at least this in theory IDs issued to certain standards by private actors. E.g. Norway has MinID (government issued), BankID (bank issued, also allows bank logins), Commfides and BuyPass, all of which issues id's that you can use to log in or sign with that tie your signature to the Norwegian national ID number.
Many of the countries makes extensive use of these IDs. E.g. in Norway you can log in to most government services with any of the recognised providers, and can sign contracts and even marriage licenses with them.
Interestingly Norway and Estonia appears to be the only two countries that have submitted more than one eID scheme to the European Commission for acceptance across the EEA, and interestingly for Norway both of them are privately provided; the (lower security) government run ID scheme has not been submitted:
nope, if we create an easy mechanism to force someone to prove he's one real government-identified person then sites will gradually require it.
suspended from twitter? can't create another account cause you only have one id!
want to share something anonymously to avoid getting fired or investigated by feds? tough, you're required to sign in with your MyID to keep everyone safe!
the only way to prevent this is to not build it and vote out anyone who tries to create it.
government ruins and abuses everything it touches, we have a consistent pattern of behavior to go off here
we should actually be moving in the opposite direction.
i shouldn't have to prove i'm anyone basically ever, except for taxes and census.
not for planes or trains or buying liquor.
driving can be licensed but should be an "anonymous license", like "i'm driver #9238" not "i'm fred the licensed driver".
and those numbers ("driver number", ssn) should be barred from use as identification for any other purpose with massive penalties.
here's the moral reason why: forcing ID creates tools for administering punishment/"accountability", but it does this in advance of something being judged as wrongdoing. basically prior restraint on a mass scale. and when the government promulgates ID technologies it promulgates tools for this abuse of liberty.
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.
Anything resembling a modern society is built on identity.
How would you access a bank account anonymously?
How would you file your taxes anonymously?
Get an education? Acquire (legal) drugs? Buy a house? Travel abroad (and back again)?
Most countries have a way to provide identity to provide the above services. Passports are an internationally federated system, but there is no equivalent for digital signatures.
This is a problem when you want to study or work abroad, or receive pension from abroad, or any of a dozen other real world situations that regularly causes headaches for normal people.
It already exists if you need the IRS or if you want to buy/sell treasuries. We don’t need an identity that spans the internet. It will become compelled eventually.
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.
> I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies") is vastly larger than the group of people who actually need anonymity.
I just don't think that's true. Many people have opinions that will lead them to being attacked and cancelled, etc. There are groups of people ready to isolate and pounce on whoever they can so as to compel others to shut-up.
I get what you're saying but I don't agree that government has a place in regulating speech. People are free to join or leave platforms as they see fit.
> Why not? Should we shun good ideas because they can be associated with the current Big Bad?
Not all 'ideas' are 'good ideas'. Especially when governments only care about more control and once they do something unpopular, then they will abuse their 'emergency powers' to surveil, track and shutdown any unrest until the people comply. Even if it means freezing their bank accounts (and bypassing the banks) or shutting down ATMs to prevent cash withdrawals.
I would consider the US the Big Bad in this situation, given its history of genocide, racial oppression, union busting, political infiltration and disenfranchisement, mass surveillance and the current right-wing zeitgeist against women and transgender people across half the country. I wouldn't give the US an inch in this regard.
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.
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
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.
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.
I agree otherwise except on the missing out a lot part.
I haven't defederated Threads on my instance as it has so far not become a problem. They can easily become one if they for example start pushing up ads into the stream.
Most Mastodon users have what they want, they aren't really missing out on anything. Except ads and spying mainly.
I agree for ads - I don't think it would be acceptable to push ads to other servers. I'm not sure if it's even possible in the standard because they'd have to have some sort of an ad account, but if the user on your instance is not following that account they'd never see the ad.
As for missing out, I guess it's a matter of perspective. I would assume that right now most Mastodon users have at least one more account on a mainstream corporate social media site - Twitter, Instagram, whatever. What they are missing out from Mastodon, they get on other places.
But if we imagine a scenario where ActivityPub becomes mainstream and all providers start supporting it, there are two totally different experiences.
An experience of a person on a server that federates with everyone could mean having just one account and follow everything from one place. For example Twitter would support ActivityPub so you can follow Twitter users without an account there. You could follow a Youtube channel and have it in your feed. The owner of the channel wouldn't need to create a separate account on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, or something - their channel is their followable account on all platforms.
The experience of a person on a small mastodon server that defederates from big corporate servers would be exactly as is today. To follow users of Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Youtube, etc you'd maintain another account. But in the future where ActivityPub is mainstream, that other account is also activitypub-compatible. So, why have two when one is less "powerful" than the other?
Letting the imagination run wild, in such future scenario ActivityPub feeds could be integrated deeply into your iOS/Android phone UI, without needing a separate app. Perhaps also on TV. Most people will want an account that doesn't limit them.
I'm sure that ads thing is something they put 99% of their resources on. They can easily augment their users' posts by randomly adding ads into them when relayed to ActivityPub. They can also comment on posts automatically or half-automatically from ads accounts.
They can also post as their users. Like YouTube, when you look at a video, they put ad videos there in the start and in between, so they could do something like that by posting ads on influencer accounts.
They can also reward the people themselves for posting ads.
Anyhow, I already got one spam message on Mastodon from that browser-embedded instance, Vivaldi, because they didn't do a great job in vetting their users. I was already ready to block them if I receive another, but I never did.
They will find a way to push garbage on ActivityPub I have no doubt.
Regarding defederation, there are different levels. Typically you would silence the instance but allow people to follow single accounts from there.
If it's more powerful to be fully open, then an email client without a spam filter would be superior to one with a spam filter.
Twitter is moving towards closing up their network from users not signed in. EU is making it mandatory for social networks to be interoperable though, so that pulls to the other direction. In any case, it's not a great future for the big social network corporations because people can choose to have either what they offer or roughly the same without ads or tracking.
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.
The German federal government also operates a mastodon server, which a number of ministries and governmental organizations use: https://social.bund.de/public/local
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.
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?
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.
eh, it's a pretty vanilla rails app. they can scale horizontally with the right resources, connection pool settings, and a db that is adequately sized.
chances are this was just allocated a small number of initial resources as it was never intended to hit a high traffic page like HN
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't sound like they needed a microblogging platform, just a web page that could be easily updated. Their use of Twitter in the first place would appear to be the crux of the problem.
Twitter has a built in notification system. People can subscribe to get alerts from it. Theoretically people can do that with RSS but, let's be honest, most people don't use RSS. I saw in another comment that they do have an RSS feed though if that's your cup of tea
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
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...
>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
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.
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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.