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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.
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.
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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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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.
Gmail itself, in that situation, is just a frontend to the mail server. You can use the same domain, on any mail server, with any frontend, and it would work just as well. It's just that Google Workspace apps are familiar to most users. But even then, the industry leader is Microsoft with their Office Suite which is yet another option
It's still Google's mail server. The mail client is irrelevant.
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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"
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.
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i'll take country defederation dramas over the shit we have now any day.
Nah they're too petty for that. They'd make a huge show about how they're going to block the US and everyone else. Then they'll block.
Then they'll quietly unblock everyone.
Three months later they'll do all over again.
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https://www.overheid.nl/english
Overheid.nl is the central access point to all information about government organisations of the Netherlands.
Can wait to see mass adoption of fediverse over other countries to provide updates
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.
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Can't wait for it to be overrun by germans.
They're not going to have open signups. It's government agencies only. Not that there's technically anything stopping Germans from joining the PR departments of our government agencies…
Please note that this server does not accept refugees from Twitter and the admins will collapse if you ask them too.
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!
TIL that I am a proud German citizen. Our government is leading the digital transition in Europe. 🇩🇪
Wait that is also government based?
Poggers
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 @news@cnn.social or something. Then Wolf could have @Wolf.Blitzer@cnn.social.
Instant “verification” that way, too.
But we’ll see.
Wow. Decentralization as a whole will be a game changer for all corners of media, science etc.
Given how the fediverse is kinda like e-mail, this feels like a natural next step.
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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.
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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.
Great news!
I would love US governments / states to start their own instance on the fediverse. Talk about explosive growth to this community.
The fact that a state government used a commercial service to inform the public is absurd, and this was bound to happen eventually.
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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