this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I never understood why official goverment body’s do that anyway. Maintaining your own infra means you have full control. This should be mandatory for any government body. Not beeing dependant on big tech who make up silly rules as they please.
I think most govt bodies do both.
They run and report on their own infrastructure and also report wherever else the masses are.
Really makes sense for govts to start running their own mastodon instances I reckon.
i read an article a few weeks ago that said that our (the Netherlands) government is working on its own Mastodon instance, i hope they actually pull through with that :)
The German government also has its own instance: https://social.bund.de/public/local
Also here's the instance of the European Union: https://social.network.europa.eu/public/local
And the European Union even has a Peertube instance: https://tube.network.europa.eu/videos/local?c=true&s=2
It is already up and running, you can see posts from various government agencies at https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
They have one now at social.overheid.nl which they seem to test at the moment. They have a few accounts such as Belastingdienst, KNMI, Rijkswaterstaat, MinBZK so I hope they’ll continue after the experiment phase is over.
Yeah i hope so too!
Yeah mastodon has come a long way. I hope your govt manages to pull it off just to prove it can be done.
Then I think many others will follow.
It really does make a lot of sense for govts. They have their instance and can then host accounts for all their departments. People from all over the Fediverse can then sub to them for updates.
Thing is, it made sense until Twitter got sold to a capricious billionaire. Twitter was very stable and their rules didn’t change much before then. The APIs made them an easy way to send out a lot of info in a popular, easily to access way. It worked well as a system for both government agencies and citizens, until Elon decided to stick his dick in it.
It never made sense. Government should not have favourites in social media. Everything government does should be on an open standard.
But thats exactly the problem :) some ego steps in and boom! As a foreign government you simply cant trust that a privatly owned company has your best interest at heart, and they shouldn’t.
Yep. The BBC & NPR found that out. Notice that the BBC stood up their own Mastodon instance - they know the value of owning one's house instead of renting.
How often do you browse government sites?
It's easier to bring the information to the people than it is to bring the people to the information. Social Media is (has previously been...) perfect for that.
Fair point :)
Japanese local governments, let alone the central one, still have almost zero knowledge about the value of maintaining infrastructure which they should have full control. Virtually even discourses about it do not exist yet. Huge difference between the European governments.
The beauty of that is that knowledge can be transferred :) But i suppose they have to be willing first.
Unless the governments would change radically how they see FOSS from a way of reducing money cost…
Right? They’re still using floppy disks and fax machines.
Fax machines are one of the main ways of communications there. I guess floppy disks are indeed partly used at municipal offices yet.
Oh, very much so. There was a big news story about two years ago where a police officer lost a floppy disk that had a bunch of people’s personal information on it.
Well, all you have to do is convince the public to pay for it. Easy, peasy....
Given the amount of tax money thats beeing wasted already, its only a small drop in the ocean.
Agreed - any competent municipal IT dept. can set up an instance without breaking a sweat - set up a VM, install your OS of choice, install Lemmy & its stack, set up the DB, register the domain, find some interns to moderate & do scut work. Not completely trivial, but within modest means.
Japanese local governments, let alone the central one, still have almost zero knowledge about the value of maintaining infrastructure which they should have full control. Virtually even discourses about it do not exist yet. Huge difference from the European governments.