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.
Surveillance? In what sense, here in particular. A bit confused. Also, it depends on the kind of private instance you mean, since this is private too, in the sense you cannot make accounts on it. What other benefit do they gain over people, using this over a corporate website?
It looks like a state government was creating their own mastodon instance which, when plugged into the rest, would give them surveillance and digital wire tapping powers that today they do not have?
Again, what can they tap or see into that they couldn’t before? All info on the other servers is public, that would be true for any federated server. I really don’t get how they’d get any more access to your data than another random person on the internet seeing your profile. They’re not making their own instance available to make accounts on, or enable users to post on it directly. You aren’t giving them any more details than you would if you had a Twitter account that was public.
It is quite literally just for official government information dissemination without being locked behind rate limits.
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.
I think you’re fundementally misunderstanding the purpose of these state instances. They’re a one-way broadcast channel from the government to the people. It’s not a social platform and no one except the government can create an account.
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.
Just the opposite, I would argue…the role of the state should be to keep a market free so that open & standard-based solutions can replace vertical & proprietary solutions.
You mean fair, not free. The only way to avoid the tyranny of the powerful is regulation restricting their freedom to abuse their powers.
THAT’S what the government is supposed to do to a market: help the small to regular sized fish and cooperation between them by, amongst other things, erecting fences keeping off the sharks that would otherwise immediately eat them.
Also stuff with plants, I guess, but this ocean analogy is probably long and complicated enough already 😂
There is verification of sorts for what it’s worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.
It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond “this is a famous person”, since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.
That sounds like a great idea. Kind of like Twitter verification except the verification that you’re really a government official comes from the fact that your home server is a government run one.
And the same could go for corporate accounts. You’re a public relations guy at Roblox and want an official, verified account on mastodon/in the fediverse? Spin up social.roblox.com as a mastodon server that has your PR account as its only user, disable open account registration and you’re good to go. (maybe an optional dummy account to get federation going by subscribing to all known fediverse servers of interest)
Calling Twitter blue “verification” is a sad joke. You’re just paying the company money and you get the check. There’s no verification whatsoever. You can easily pretend you’re someone else or “verify” an army of bots.
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)
Decentralized yet federated open platforms are part of the free market - and a victory of the free market. Consolidating media into an empire is a problem … but … ultimately … a problem the free market can solve, as long as the role of government keeps a free market free.
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.
Meanwhile, government and education are still completely (and happily, it seems) shackled to Microsoft and Google, of course.
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?
By the way Mastodon has a very nice interface to subscribe to other instances. Like now when using when following the link in OPs post and opening a web browser, then clicking on a user and clicking follow, it gives the option to sign in to subscribe OR copy a link to subscribe from another instance . Then I just paste that link in the search field in my Mastodon app (logged in to mastodon.online). Hopefully Lemmy will implement that “button to copy link to subscribe from other instance” soon
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.
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.
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.
In a way, this gives me hope that the fediverse might actually survive in a way bigger capacity than XMPP did even if Threads/Meta manages to EEE a large part of the fediverse.
Yeah, I think theres quite a few reasons to be hopeful. Also why I personally am not very interested in comparisons to XMPP and EEE. To me, that refers to a different time on the internet, where corporations where way more interested in fighting an opensource threat. But times have changed, and for Big Tech, it seems to me they are way more worried about regulations than about opensource competitors.
Not to say that this automatically means that the fediverse will be a success, not at all, this shit is hard. But to properly judge what challenges await the fediverse, I think its more fruitful to look at what Big Tech is concerned by, and what governments are thinking about. And I see very little talk about EEE from those actors. Instead, its mainly focused on regulations, privacy, and sovereign power.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I fully expect Meta to go EEE. That they’re not talking about it in those terms makes sense, given that the Embrace part has barely started. Don’t want to spook the part of the prey that still feels safe.
I just have a bit of hope that the fediverse might survive it better.
and thanks for the shoutout! I do need to update my bio and get proper accounts. For now just testing out the water a little bit, havent really fully decided on which server I want to pick. reason Im replying with 2 accounts is that federation between kbin.social and lemmy.ml specifically is still broken, couldnt even see your reply. Not sure how to approach that yet
Well it was reflexive choice I think. American anti government sentiment without thinking through whether the instance or government department in question was providing a service that some would benefit from on the fediverse.
We’re afraid of all government spying, including our own. I just think most Americans don’t really understand that other governments, especially in the EU, have significantly better privacy laws and protections for foreigners than America has for its own citizens.
All governments, large NGOs, and news orgs should do this. Maybe there should be a “mastodon in a box” which is a simplified containerized version of the service which makes it easy to set up and secure.
docker is part of it but not everything in and of itself. You probably need a docker compose where database, frontends, backends are separate images but possibly something more than that, kubernetes pods, and storage being separate. Probably cloud based or has cloud based backend options. I think a script could make the process easy and scale appropriately.
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.
Wow, I never thought about this, but this is probably pretty good to have right? Might be a good way to find info about something if their sites are really confusing etc possibly
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 @[email protected] or something. Then Wolf could have @[email protected].
How would you propose government officials officially distribute verified information? Just for government officials and distribution, that’s the whole point of having a .gov domain is so you can know it’s official
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.
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.
Governments have been PAYING to inform the public via commercial services for… ever? And requiring citizens to do the same. Have you ever seen a public notice in a newspaper? At least posting on Twitter is free (for now).
Why is it absurd? The best way to reach people is on the platforms they use. People are not going to install some government app or use a special website to see those kinds of messages.
I don’t want my government spamming my inbox with updates. I don’t know how active government Twitter accounts tend to be but I suspect there are plenty of things that are significant enough to announce via some platform but not significant enough that they merit an email.
RSS would be great and I fully support governments using it. But sadly in this day and age it would reach significantly fewer people than Twitter.
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
Because it is a platform governed by a 3rd party entity in a foreign country. That platform can ban and censor citizen, based on foreign cultural values and arbitrary rules, limiting citizen access to their own goverments information.
The platform governments choose to use for public information and debate should always provide open and public access to that information.
A government should not require its citizen to create a Twitter account, and thereby requiring them to provide their personal information to a foreign country, just to be part of the public debate and to get public information. That is just plainly wrong.
That’s nice but all of that is irrelevant. You can view tweets without making an account.
Also, not one government solely relies on Twitter to disperse information, it is just one additional channel. They also use their own websites, apps, TV and radio.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
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I want to see Canada next!
I hope other governments, small and large, start doing this.
tbh - I am not a fan of state-run media, would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people.
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.
Surveillance with neither a warrant nor probable cause.
A private instance on an open platform, by the state, for the state? Sure. Go for it.
Surveillance? In what sense, here in particular. A bit confused. Also, it depends on the kind of private instance you mean, since this is private too, in the sense you cannot make accounts on it. What other benefit do they gain over people, using this over a corporate website?
It looks like a state government was creating their own mastodon instance which, when plugged into the rest, would give them surveillance and digital wire tapping powers that today they do not have?
Again, what can they tap or see into that they couldn’t before? All info on the other servers is public, that would be true for any federated server. I really don’t get how they’d get any more access to your data than another random person on the internet seeing your profile. They’re not making their own instance available to make accounts on, or enable users to post on it directly. You aren’t giving them any more details than you would if you had a Twitter account that was public. It is quite literally just for official government information dissemination without being locked behind rate limits.
What exactly do you think they’ll be able to do now?
They can see pretty much all the things without an instance. So can you. Social media is not private.
Exactly this. In the same way I expect to be able to email the government, but I wouldn’t expect to send them a message on Facebook Messenger.
Open platforms over walled gardens.
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.
It’s like saying government officers should use gmail accounts instead of writing their emails from their own government-run email servers.
Why shouldn’t the state be subject to the same whims as its citizens? How else will the state have skin in the game?
To me, the free market has produced both Lemmy and Mastodon - I wouldn’t count it out just yet.
So Lemmy and Mastodon instances are free market solutions, unless a government does it? I don’t even understand what your point is.
For media, a state platform in order of goodness:
non state (open) platform > non state (closed) platform > State owned platform
most times when the state takes an action it deprives it’s citizens of the beneficial outcomes of that action (skill, monetary).
Which would be better - open instances in each country where the state ( country and regional/s) is a participant along with its citizens?
Or instances where the state and its infinite power is private and above the people the state would govern?
My reaction is not to a state using mastodon nor twitter for that matter. My reaction is to a state running mastodon separate from the people.
I think you’re fundementally misunderstanding the purpose of these state instances. They’re a one-way broadcast channel from the government to the people. It’s not a social platform and no one except the government can create an account.
Why is that a good or better thing?
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.
Just the opposite, I would argue…the role of the state should be to keep a market free so that open & standard-based solutions can replace vertical & proprietary solutions.
You mean fair, not free. The only way to avoid the tyranny of the powerful is regulation restricting their freedom to abuse their powers.
THAT’S what the government is supposed to do to a market: help the small to regular sized fish and cooperation between them by, amongst other things, erecting fences keeping off the sharks that would otherwise immediately eat them.
Also stuff with plants, I guess, but this ocean analogy is probably long and complicated enough already 😂
lol! yes, we likely agree. A free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies, and artificial scarcity.
free market and rules of the people in one sentence?
you mean like facebook? haha!
like lemmy! of course.
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.
There is verification of sorts for what it’s worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.
It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond “this is a famous person”, since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.
That sounds like a great idea. Kind of like Twitter verification except the verification that you’re really a government official comes from the fact that your home server is a government run one.
And the same could go for corporate accounts. You’re a public relations guy at Roblox and want an official, verified account on mastodon/in the fediverse? Spin up social.roblox.com as a mastodon server that has your PR account as its only user, disable open account registration and you’re good to go. (maybe an optional dummy account to get federation going by subscribing to all known fediverse servers of interest)
Calling Twitter blue “verification” is a sad joke. You’re just paying the company money and you get the check. There’s no verification whatsoever. You can easily pretend you’re someone else or “verify” an army of bots.
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)
Decentralized yet federated open platforms are part of the free market - and a victory of the free market. Consolidating media into an empire is a problem … but … ultimately … a problem the free market can solve, as long as the role of government keeps a free market free.
Yeah all of this free market media we’re enjoying is the real height of journalistic integrity and quality
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.
Meanwhile, government and education are still completely (and happily, it seems) shackled to Microsoft and Google, of course.
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
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?
You can follow them from your already existing Mastodon (and maybe kbin?) account.
From my account on mastodon.online I just followed https://social.overheid.nl/@beheerder as a test, and I’ve already been following https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission
For some reason my server couldn’t find users from the social.bund.de when I pasted the follow-link (like https://social.bund.de/@Zoll )
By the way Mastodon has a very nice interface to subscribe to other instances. Like now when using when following the link in OPs post and opening a web browser, then clicking on a user and clicking follow, it gives the option to sign in to subscribe OR copy a link to subscribe from another instance . Then I just paste that link in the search field in my Mastodon app (logged in to mastodon.online). Hopefully Lemmy will implement that “button to copy link to subscribe from other instance” soon
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.
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.
In a way, this gives me hope that the fediverse might actually survive in a way bigger capacity than XMPP did even if Threads/Meta manages to EEE a large part of the fediverse.
Yeah, I think theres quite a few reasons to be hopeful. Also why I personally am not very interested in comparisons to XMPP and EEE. To me, that refers to a different time on the internet, where corporations where way more interested in fighting an opensource threat. But times have changed, and for Big Tech, it seems to me they are way more worried about regulations than about opensource competitors.
Not to say that this automatically means that the fediverse will be a success, not at all, this shit is hard. But to properly judge what challenges await the fediverse, I think its more fruitful to look at what Big Tech is concerned by, and what governments are thinking about. And I see very little talk about EEE from those actors. Instead, its mainly focused on regulations, privacy, and sovereign power.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I fully expect Meta to go EEE. That they’re not talking about it in those terms makes sense, given that the Embrace part has barely started. Don’t want to spook the part of the prey that still feels safe.
I just have a bit of hope that the fediverse might survive it better.
Hey! I was trying to be vague and anonymous!! 😅
But yea … totally with you!!
For those that don’t know, this person is the author of https://fediversereport.com/ and posts here like this.
@[email protected] … you could add more links and what not to your bio here … ?
haha well think it mostly worked :D
and thanks for the shoutout! I do need to update my bio and get proper accounts. For now just testing out the water a little bit, havent really fully decided on which server I want to pick. reason Im replying with 2 accounts is that federation between kbin.social and lemmy.ml specifically is still broken, couldnt even see your reply. Not sure how to approach that yet
Oh wow. Didn’t know about the broken federation.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/173366/lemmy-ml-is-no-longer-shadowbanning-kbin#comments
seems like a side effect of lemmy devs being overloaded with info and messages getting on a long backlog
How does federating two public instances enable spying
Well it was reflexive choice I think. American anti government sentiment without thinking through whether the instance or government department in question was providing a service that some would benefit from on the fediverse.
America has a lot of problems right now leading to exceptionally low trust in government, even for them.
We’re afraid of all government spying, including our own. I just think most Americans don’t really understand that other governments, especially in the EU, have significantly better privacy laws and protections for foreigners than America has for its own citizens.
Unfortunately there are people in the EU continously pushing for mass surveilance laws
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
All governments, large NGOs, and news orgs should do this. Maybe there should be a “mastodon in a box” which is a simplified containerized version of the service which makes it easy to set up and secure.
It’s called docker. Linuxserver.io offers very close to “mastodon in a box”. https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/mastodon
docker is part of it but not everything in and of itself. You probably need a docker compose where database, frontends, backends are separate images but possibly something more than that, kubernetes pods, and storage being separate. Probably cloud based or has cloud based backend options. I think a script could make the process easy and scale appropriately.
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.
Wow, I never thought about this, but this is probably pretty good to have right? Might be a good way to find info about something if their sites are really confusing etc possibly
That’s a good point. But I think the fediverse needs less friction for this to benefit more of the general public.
Like any new technology, I think it will take a while for the experience to get smoothed out
deleted by creator
Why?
Defederation and the Dutch
Why exactly?
afaik european comission’s instance isn’t usually defederated so I don’t see why this one would?
Italy will follow soon 🤥
And all other EU countries. Then crimew.gay will defederate them all later.
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 @[email protected] or something. Then Wolf could have @[email protected].
Instant “verification” that way, too.
But we’ll see.
Given how the fediverse is kinda like e-mail, this feels like a natural next step.
Agreed, not sure how I feel about governments setting up their own servers, but news organizations definitely.
Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.
How would you propose government officials officially distribute verified information? Just for government officials and distribution, that’s the whole point of having a .gov domain is so you can know it’s official
That’s a really great idea. It makes so much sense that it seems weird that it’s not already the way things are done.
Wow. Decentralization as a whole will be a game changer for all corners of media, science etc.
The only way they would do that is if they could monetize it somehow.
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.
Isn’t their entire strategy to fish people onto their site, make money that way? Twitter doesn’t pay them either.
Does CNN already own that domain?
I have no idea. That’s just an example.
Ah, okay, it would make more sense to say something like
social.cnn.comsince they already own and usecnn.com.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 don’t remember which pizza chain (or it has since been fixed) but something like
papajohns.pizzaused to redirect todominos.com.I had the same exact thoughts when the first twitter migration happened. I doubt we will see it, but I can dream.
That is pretty cool
I hope that other governments follow suit.
The fact that a state government used a commercial service to inform the public is absurd, and this was bound to happen eventually.
Governments have been PAYING to inform the public via commercial services for… ever? And requiring citizens to do the same. Have you ever seen a public notice in a newspaper? At least posting on Twitter is free (for now).
“For now”, is right. That isn’t always the case.
Why is it absurd? The best way to reach people is on the platforms they use. People are not going to install some government app or use a special website to see those kinds of messages.
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 don’t want my government spamming my inbox with updates. I don’t know how active government Twitter accounts tend to be but I suspect there are plenty of things that are significant enough to announce via some platform but not significant enough that they merit an email.
RSS would be great and I fully support governments using it. But sadly in this day and age it would reach significantly fewer people than Twitter.
“this day and age” is rapidly coming to a close
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
Because it is a platform governed by a 3rd party entity in a foreign country. That platform can ban and censor citizen, based on foreign cultural values and arbitrary rules, limiting citizen access to their own goverments information.
The platform governments choose to use for public information and debate should always provide open and public access to that information.
A government should not require its citizen to create a Twitter account, and thereby requiring them to provide their personal information to a foreign country, just to be part of the public debate and to get public information. That is just plainly wrong.
That’s nice but all of that is irrelevant. You can view tweets without making an account.
Also, not one government solely relies on Twitter to disperse information, it is just one additional channel. They also use their own websites, apps, TV and radio.
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.
You think they own the servers?
lmao
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Excellent use case.