Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.

Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.

User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.

Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

Article translated in English :

Confederation closes its Mastodon instance

Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.

As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.

In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.

Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.

Too few active users

On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.

On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.

The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.

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[–] [email protected] 243 points 2 months ago (3 children)

"We've also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular."

Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I'm looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).

[–] [email protected] 87 points 2 months ago

It's accessibility, and it's also sovereignty.

Another way of rephrasing this decision is "we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X". Which is pretty questionable.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (3 children)

As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.

People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.

But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It's an awful choice, but you could still do it...

The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn't really a choice.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I can’t throw myself up the stairs. Go in g down isn’t the problem, I could scooch down on my bum. (but then I would need someone to carry my wheelchair down).

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch's distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of "optional."

Gender-affirming surgery is "optional." Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Yes definitely for hard of hearing and hard of sight people it can be an accessibility issue. I’m mostly deaf myself.

But comparing the situation for abled people in the way it was above doesn’t really work.

[–] oxomoxo 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The term “accessibility” is not the exclusive domain of the physically disabled. Accessibility affects all people across race, gender, class, age and disability.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

That’s not the point I was making. Just that the wheelchair ramp comparison doesn’t work.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

(I'm looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord)

This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.

There isn't much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

A good quality open source "federated discord" would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn't much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.

Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.

[–] dustyData 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It's the flipside of Wiki's problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There's currently nothing popular that fills the bill.

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 2 months ago (22 children)

Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (2 children)

From what I saw it was actually rising. A lot of Brazilian signed up when X was banned in their country and all the indicators are going up it seems. I don’t know where they got their numbers, to me it feels like they needed an excuse to cut costs.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 39 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I saw mastodon had a slight bump when that happened, but 90% of them went to bluesky. They got like 3 3 million users in 2 days. Mastodon got like .......a few thousand?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Even if, they don't really speak English, let alone German. You can see it on Bluesky that the majority of posts are in Portuguese.

[–] mesamunefire 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Both fedidb and other sources say the number of users are only going up.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

FediDB reports that the Mastodon active user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.

Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It's natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it's an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It's not here for explosive growth.

Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, it wouldn't really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.

Anyway, they're not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they're not entirely right either.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

9 out of 10 porn bots prefer X

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[–] DandomRude 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI is often not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality of comments can still be a lot higher. But unfortunately this cannot be quantified, or at least not easily. I therefore think that everyone should first think about what they want to achieve with their social media accounts. It then makes sense to define suitable KPIs instead of being impressed by what can be considered an indicator of success elsewhere and in a completely different context.

[–] dustyData 28 points 2 months ago

They all fall for turning KPIs into goals. When KPI become targets, they stop being KPIs. They often forget that KPIs are supposed to be used for informing the evaluation of desired outcomes, they aren't outcomes on themselves. At most they could be activitie's outputs. There are also many more stats and information that can feed the evaluation of outcomes that aren't KPIs, and qualitative evaluations are most definitely a must.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 months ago (1 children)

imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Countries will get what they want from X or Instagram either way, see Brazil.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Decisions like these are why they can't move away from proprietary platforms. How much does it really cost to host and maintain this? A single employee could host a mastodon, peertube, and lemmy instance. The employee could also work full-time on one of the projects to address issues.

They also only had 6 accounts on the instance - out of how many politicians and bureaus?

Anyway... shame.

Anti Commercial-AI license

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[–] ByteMe 23 points 2 months ago

Maybe they should have done a better job talking about mastodon

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn't block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.

They're complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

It's still on and will close at the end of the month. But yes I'm very annoyed that they didn't share much of the instance outside a small notification on the admin.ch website. But the goal of this whole pilot test is that if Mastodon became big within the year, they would already have an instance running with officials accounts. But instead I guess they will focus on Bluesky.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sad to hear

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] FYI

[–] joelthelion 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sad but unfortunately fairly justified. Hard to justify spending public money on 3,500 users.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How much funding does a single software instance serving 3500 users really require? I could probably run it off my desktop.

[–] joelthelion 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

When you're a government, you need a little more process to ensure things are done well (moderation, security, ...). Even something simple like that could take valuable time from quite a few people.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah.... If your government is so poorly implemented you can't even maintain a mastodon instance, you probably have bigger problems....

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

Yeah, with that many users you need like $30/month on AWS...

The guy who set it up probably quit, and nobody knows how it works now.

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