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.

ARD and ZDF too, probably just as significant because they’re some of the biggest media organisations in the world: https://ard.social/explore and https://zdf.social/about

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.

The British treasury also has/had a discord, obviously not on the same level as a whole Lemmy instance, but it was still pretty interesting

I’m pretty new to federation. What can I do with these two instances? Can I somehow follow them with my current account? Or do I have to create a separate account on both instances?

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.

Meanwhile, government and education are still completely (and happily, it seems) shackled to Microsoft and Google, of course.

Why not have a state-run instance on an open platform? It’s better than relying on a corporation’s platform. The government is ‘the people’ more than corporations are.

This isn’t that though. Running a federated service instance is more akin to them having to abide by the rule of the people than the status quo where Musk or Zuck could boot them from their platform or hide anything they don’t like without any reason at all.

In the fediverse, they’re choosing to run a self-hosted outlet that can interact with other privately or publicly run services. It’s like them choosing to run their own email servers instead of their officials all using gmail accounts.

The free market solutions have just led to unelected billionaire oligarchs controlling the narrative. With this federated stuff, no single entity can control the narrative (once all the kinks are ironed out like vote manipulation, exploits, etc)

would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people

you mean like facebook? haha!

True free market solutions inevitably lead to the people abiding by the rules of the rich and powerful.

Anything run by the government has to at the very least PRETEND to listen to people who don’t have a financial interest in the enshittification of every part of society.

imo mastadon wont suddenly become “state-run media” just because Goverment instances exist.

there are .gov email adresses already, and emails are pretty far from state-run.

since there is (afaik) no verification on mastadon, ill assume that theyll use the goverment instances to prove that @official@goverment is legit.

Why would a government subject itself to potential censorship of whatever admin is running their instance? It makes perfect sense for a government to host their own instance from where they can freely broadcast announcements.

And the free market has proven to be unreliable. You’re subject to whatever billionaire is ego-tripping at the top of whatever platform you’re using. The will of the people is nowhere to be seen.

Yeah all of this free market media we’re enjoying is the real height of journalistic integrity and quality

You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.

Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it’s not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.

Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.

Well because “cloud is the future” and hosting your own instances is not “cost effective”.

For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.

Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that “they will take care of everything, you don’t need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything”.

tons of large companies use gmail lol

For some crazy reason they haven’t snatched it up yet. Atleast a domain seller website is saying it is free for pickings, if you want it.

Then again maybe their policy is to put everything as subdomain on cnn.com and make cnn.com their sole brand “if it’s not on cnn.com, it’s not that CNN”. Still i would have though they defensive register all relevant TLDs, even if they never ever use them.

I have no idea. That’s just an example.

It’d be another method to drive traffic to their websites and gain more ad revenue. Same as maintaining a presence on twitter or facebook, or providing an RSS feed.

Yeah totally.

I had the thought that since Threads “doesn’t want politics” on their platform, and Twitter is trash, maaaaybe activity pub could be a thing.

But you are right: they won’t do anything if it won’t make money.

Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.

You claim to be a federation, yet you’ve shown that you are actually a defederation.

More like it tried to forcibly merge the instances

“The Russian federation defederates itself.”

This is just discord in a nutshell

I would think that, more than anything else, the issue would be more getting it through all the bureaucratic red tape. See the ESB debacle:

Weaver had been brought to Raytheon, the company the Air Force had hired to write the software for the next generation GPS satellites, because the Raytheon team was behind schedule and over budget. This issue of data transmission to the ground stations and back again was one of a few problems that was holding them back. There is an industry standard way of doing this, a simple, reliable protocol that is built into almost every operating system in the world.

But this team wasn’t using this simple protocol on its own. Instead, the team had written a piece of software to receive the message from that protocol, read the data, and then recode it into a different format, so they could feed it into a very complex piece of software called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB. The ESB eventually delivered the data to yet another piece of software, at which point the whole process ran in reverse order to deliver it back to the original, simple protocol. Because the data was taking such a roundabout route, it wasn’t arriving quickly enough for the ground stations to make the calculations needed. Using the simple protocol alone would have made the entire job a snap—as easy as nailing a couple of boards together. Instead, they had this massive Rube Goldberg contraption that was never going to work.

The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it.

I’m sure some of the fine folks at 18F would love to help various US agencies or state governments with migrating to Mastodon. I’m not so sure any of them would be able to convince geriatric politicians to do so.

There are a lot of ways they could handle it. Imagine the New York Times or similar organizations with their own customized Mastodon for live updates and Lemmy for linking to articles and for searching. Mastodon being the free to follow and the Lemmy/main site being subscription to make an account and comment.

It is absurd in the way that the previous NL-ALERT I received had a link to Twitter for more information that I couldn’t open, since I don’t have a Twitter account. When Musk decides to do something crazy with his platform it could have a direct impact on the communication between the government and the people. It is safer to use a self hosted platform so you can always reach the masses when it is needed.

They could have used a mailing list or an rss feed or half a dozen other solutions that don’t require a special website or government app.

i can get alerts on my phone from the government. plus you could have people sign up for text messages rather then follow om Twitter. I get that Twitter wasca super fast way to get announcements out to the public and it would go to the people that actually care. But itvis bad for vital communication line to be own by a third party that can’t make money since what happens when it shuts down

At least posting on Twitter is free (for now).

“For now”, is right. That isn’t always the case.