I don’t understand why Governments and organizations aren’t taking advantage of the Fediverse. Spin up an instance, set it have no comments/sign ups (no comments and no signs up means very little moderation). The Fediverse allows governments and organizations to fully control their instance.
This is what I’ve been arguing for, with some added detail:
Ideally I’d see each instance run at a state / province level. I imagine this being a manageable level of account granularity for each city and major government aligned institution in need of a short-form-text publishing vector (offices, municipal departments, etc). It would also help prevent account name collisions.
IT infra can be built to push mastodon updates downstream to other social media platforms.
RSS would probably be fine for that. Our town government still posts to Facebook, but least they mirror everything on their own site. It doesn’t seem to have RSS, but it’s better than nothing, and thankfully they quit twitter.
Something else I would love is if there was a platform for posting Instagram-type posts to somewhere open in addition to Instagram. I want to follow local artists, businesses, etc. without using Instagram, but it needs to be frictionless for non-technical people and still reach Instagram for them to consider it.
RSS is already baked into mastodon for anyone wanting to use it.
There’s still a need for some kind of service to push updates to other platforms. FB, Twitter, bsky, insta, these all have APIs to allow posts in, but have few resources to let posts flow out. So fuck 'em. They get to be at the tail end of the content centipede.
From a department owner’s perspective, the less time they think about wireup for social media stuff, the better. Post once and let it all roll out to secondary platforms.
And, IIRC, Pixelfed is the fediverse version of insta. I poked around it, but I was never really an instagram-type person.
Its the lack of control. Governments want to have a single point (company) that they can tell “this is illegal, delete it” and then be sure that its gone. Basically all governments love to have a little bit of authoritarianism.
There was a petition presented to the house… and the response sidestepped the whole petition.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-4769
Twitter is the Nazi bar and too many people are still in it. There’s no excuse anymore.
typical network effects + walled gardens. People can’t leave for the same reason they can’t leave any other platform they hate. If we want to get people to leave twitter, regulate interop.
Most of them can leave. It would just inconvenience them.
that’s right, yes. But this is true of all the other platforms as well, and people don’t leave them even when they hate them.
It’s time to start tooting instead!
It’s a mystery to me why the gov/CBC/RC are still on Shitter. Making your own instance for each of your branch is fucking easy
It wouldn’t be hard to maintain multiple accounts. I just don’t get it.
The australian PM doesnt even have a public email address, the parliament website suggests contacting him on twitter
the same government who are constantly in a public fight with musk over the content on his website for respectable public figures lol
That can’t be true…right?
Partially.
This is what I found first which does indeed feature a twitter icon. And a phone number https://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=R36#t2-content-panel
Then I came across https://www.pm.gov.au/contact which uses a web form to send an email to him.
It still amazes me after all the shit that Twitter has been through that people still use it.
The network effect seems to be the strong nuclear force of online interaction.
They should maybe have done that when it became clear the site was run by a Nazi, but better late then never.
It’s basically government officials and news organizations having their main communication channels be on 4chan. That’s where we’re at. It’s ridiculous.
That’s the reason? Gosh.
I see X users these days as the frogs in the slow boiling pots.
I sense that some of the people who remain in X had some rationales. Those who liked what they saw in terms of abuse or bad behaviour would naturally stay for more.
Perhaps others felt their voices would resist mis/disinformation, or contribute to greater discussion. But, those who chose to stay, regardless of reason, ended up conditioning themselves to receive or disregard abuse beyond all sense.
Now the platform clearly violates its members, and Musk has once again affirmed publicly that he is a white supremacist. Users - including government accounts - who remain have unwittingly become members of an extremist, white supremacist website that peddles CSAM materials.
I think it’s the stuff of movies, and something a villain, like the Joker, would have done.
I used to be on there, and when I look back in from time to time I see more and more of both accounts I followed that have become inactive and accounts I followed that stayed and have gone far right. People who I never would have expected to go that way but who stayed on that platform keep getting pulled towards fascism, white supremacy, and might makes right worldviews. It’s awful to see.
I’ll point out that others say similar things about Reddit.
I have been writing the MPs to get off of US big tech for a while.
