[HN Gopher] Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
___________________________________________________________________
Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
Author : yread
Score : 314 points
Date : 2023-07-12 15:06 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (social.overheid.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (social.overheid.nl)
| SargeDebian wrote:
| Some relevant context: the Netherlands recently had a severe
| storm, for which the government sent out a Cell Broadcast (SMS-
| CB), which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that
| time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't signed
| in, which highlighted the problems of governments relying on the
| whims of tech players in getting these messages out.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...the problems of governments relying on the whims of tech
| players...
|
| This is such a big problem where entities - and not only
| governments, but also other corporaate entities, and private
| citizens - rely far too much on the for-profit tech platforms.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > which in some regions contained a link to Twitter. At that
| time, Twitter had restricted access for people who weren't
| signed in, which highlighted the problems of governments
| relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages
| out.
|
| The government doesn't have a website where it can host a page
| and create a link? That's just lazy.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Of course they do. But people are not trained to bookmark a
| slew of government pages and then figure out the right one to
| go to in various situations. They are, however, trained to go
| to Twitter and see urgent alerts collated neatly in one
| place.
| didntcheck wrote:
| I remember saying to friends "isn't it a bit of a liability how
| Twitter is becoming the 'official' outlet for so many
| organisations, including the government?" back in like 2011 or
| whenever it was breaking into the mainstream. At the time there
| hadn't been any major controversies that I recall, so it looked
| like I was tilting at windmills a bit. It is nice to finally
| feel like I'm not the crazy person now, after a decade. Though
| it was quite disillusioning to see how many people wildly swung
| their view on whether it was a good idea to have one company
| controlling so much of society's discourse, based entirely on
| whether they agreed with the company's current leadership's
| politics, not on principle
| whalesalad wrote:
| the IT department realizing the tiny little instance they put up
| as a test is now on HN
| blitzar wrote:
| Better to discover now, than when there is a population level
| event.
| hcks wrote:
| Instance is down at the time of writing this.
|
| This just shows that Mastodon isn't fit for this use case.
|
| I mean an IT department, having to manage resources, load, live
| traffic, just for what?
|
| A PA that will 'benefit' (as a gimmick) a tiny fraction of the
| citizens.
| whalesalad wrote:
| eh, it's a pretty vanilla rails app. they can scale
| horizontally with the right resources, connection pool
| settings, and a db that is adequately sized.
|
| chances are this was just allocated a small number of initial
| resources as it was never intended to hit a high traffic page
| like HN
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| This was my thought. I'm not sure government officials
| themselves would be able to handle using Mastodon in the same
| way they do twitter/etc.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I don't really know how Mastodon works, but one thing I've
| wondered is, how does is a small instance affected by
| federating with a large instance? If, for example, some
| instance were to grow to a significant percentage of Twitter
| in terms of usage, does that spill over into servers that are
| federated with it? Or do instances only pull data by request
| so that it's own userbase size is the main determiner of
| load?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| ActivityPub has the notion of a "shared inbox", so if N
| different accounts on alpha.example follow an account on
| beta.example then beta.example only has to send a _single_
| copy of a post made by that account to alpha.example rather
| than N copies of the same post.
| progval wrote:
| Federating with other instances isn't binary: instances
| subscribe to individual users.
| a13o wrote:
| I love this. In general, I would like to see municipalities take
| on more IT responsibilities. Tax-funded cloud storage and digital
| communications services would weaken tech companies and make
| accessing these table stakes features more equitable. Give
| libraries something to do.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| who is running their server for them? In house or did they buy a
| mastohost or whatever? Curious if this is another thing they've
| thrown IT money at because someone needs to run their instance(s)
| now
| progval wrote:
| Hard to tell. Server is at Hetzner (that's also where its
| outgoing requests are coming from, so not just a dumb reverse
| proxy).
|
| TLS cert is signed by QuoVadis Trustlink, so probably not
| mastohost (which uses Let's Encrypt).
| landgenoot wrote:
| Probably a freelancer. Last week, the contact info of the
| instance was from a very small company.
| https://tweakers.net/i/Hqc1sIs2fIQeo2Vu_NR-
| Lbllyuo=/1280x/fi...
| yread wrote:
| Wow kinda surreal it's just this one guy (his LN account is
| linked from the litra-it.eu website) who has 4 likes on his
| LN post while all kinds of media ran with the story: https:
| //www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7084964...
| thatgerhard wrote:
| Massive alarm bells in my head for this..
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Massive alarm bells in my head for this..
|
| Would you care to expand on that, or should we just use our
| imaginnation?
| nerdbert wrote:
| Yes, it is super scary that the government is trying to
| communicate using platforms independent of foreign social media
| companies.
|
| I assume you are Elon's alt?
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| What's next, a government with an HTTP server?
| morkalork wrote:
| Or worse, their own SMTP server!
| pndy wrote:
| SargeDebian bit up there explains why they decided to deploy
| their Mastodon server - the reason seem pretty valid.
| swayvil wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a nice peer to peer social media thing?
|
| Hey https://getaether.net/
| olah_1 wrote:
| This is what I always wanted to see. Municipalities running
| federated servers. Solves the problem of "which server do I pick"
| and also gives user guarantees that are tangibly bound to real
| entities.
|
| I think a whole nation is too big for one server of course. But
| some kind of breakdown based on reasonable subsidiarity would be
| great. In the US, maybe it would be counties. Sort of like phone
| numbers, you may choose to keep your original area code even
| after you move, or eventually maybe you update and move your
| account to the new server when you settle in.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Like the EU instance, this seems only for the government?
|
| For mastodon to be successful, people need a neutral ground.
|
| People don't care to join a server for functional programming
| that then turns into a server for anarchism at which point they
| get kicked out because they're not an anarchist or the wrong kind
| of anarchist.
|
| Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground.
| keskival wrote:
| No, Mastodon instances shouldn't be neutral. They should
| present their colors so that other instances can more easily
| decide whether to federate with them or not.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground.
|
| Quite the opposite. They're as non-neutral as anarchists except
| have literally the inverse positions on major issues (which
| they enforce with violence.) That's hardly neutral.
| danijelb wrote:
| The government shouldn't provide that service to ordinary
| citizens, same as they don't provide email hosting on
| government email servers. I think it helps if you think about
| Mastodon as email. Government runs their accounts on government
| server, other users can interact with their content from other
| servers.
|
| As for people caring about a server for functional programming
| or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state
| of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and
| experimental technology.
|
| I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large
| corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub
| (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and
| then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they
| want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub
| service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will
| support it), different media companies could run their
| services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances
| bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there
| will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by
| enthusiasts for a variety of topics.
|
| Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own
| instances, because an account on an official well-known domain
| acts as verification.
|
| The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.
| rickette wrote:
| 503, hugged to death.
| jojobaskins wrote:
| Same, until they can handle random request spikes
| twitter/threads will still be necessary. Imagine if the US Govt
| made an official social media site, shudder...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Imagine if the US Govt made an official social media site,
| shudder
|
| The US (and other governments) run and maintain a lot more
| complicated digital infrastructure, it's just that a Mastodon
| server like this is likely run by two interns with a Digital
| ocean gift card
| dynamorando wrote:
| Could someone in Europe educate me as to why it seems (at least
| to me) that Europe seems to be leading in leveraging the
| Fediverse, along with data governance policies (the Data Act,
| GDPR?) versus America?
|
| I assume it's because Europe is adverse to American companies,
| and I assume that culture wise America will never adopt these
| kinds of strategies, but I'd like to hear from others on this.
| devjab wrote:
| I'm surprised at how the EU has been sleeping on this platform.
| Well maybe not the EU, as the Union itself actually has a server
| instance for both its organisations and it's elected officials,
| but the member countries. Like my own. All our politicians are on
| social media, but they are all on three platforms, two which are
| owned by two American billionaires and one which is owned by the
| Chinese government. All three platforms has massive privacy and
| democracy issues in terms of how they operate, and none of the
| content on them are owned by their users. Now I'm all for the EU
| using regulation to eventually reform something like meta into
| being a decent enough centralised platform. But why on earth
| would our institutions be on something they don't control?
|
| With ActivityPub and Mastodon our government could run a server
| for all our elected officials and then it would be our country
| that governed what they could and could not post on there. Now,
| I'm not a political radical, but I do think it's sort of silly
| that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can
| say on a social media. This isn't an issue for like 99% of them,
| but the concept is just anti-democratic.
|
| The same could sort of be said about our journalists. If we had a
| press corps server instance, then someone posting that Tibet is a
| country or whatever "radical" thing you can get banned for,
| wouldn't become a conflict of interest. Because they'd be allowed
| to write that, and our press corp genuinely couldn't give two
| shits what China has to say about it.
| spookie wrote:
| As someone who has contributed to the Fediverse, I can assure
| you the EU hasn't been sleeping on this and has helped many
| other projects (not just Mastodon) through funding.
|
| Really, if anything, they've helped a lot of folks sustaining
| their contributions.
| rossng wrote:
| To give a specific example, the EU has a funding programme
| called NGI to support 'next generation internet' projects.
| Some (all?) of this money is distributed through a small
| organisation called NLNet, who have decided to support a
| number of Fediverse projects:
|
| - Mastodon: https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/
|
| - Lemmy: https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/
|
| - Pixelfed: https://nlnet.nl/project/Pixelfed/
|
| - Misskey: https://nlnet.nl/project/Misskey/
|
| - Bonfire: https://nlnet.nl/project/Bonfire/
|
| And quite a few more. Honestly, I'm not sure how much of the
| ActivityPub ecosystem would exist without this funding.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I love love love the concept of federated social media. The
| onboarding experience though. Just signed up at
| pixelfed.social, installed the Android app, try to log in
| and ... nothing happens?!? No error, nothing.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| You are not being "onboarded" - they are not a business
| and you are not a customer (or an employee).
|
| Which may also explain the additional friction - sounds
| like you encountered a bug, or else the instance was just
| temporarily having issues. If the problem persists I
| would suggest filing an issue (assuming you are using an
| open source app).
| barbazoo wrote:
| I would file a bug if I got an error message at least.
| But without even an error message, what would I even tell
| them?!
| tough wrote:
| Login doesnt work
|
| I do this and this and this and use this and this end of
| transcript
| WA wrote:
| Giving money and using products are two entirely different
| forms of support.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| The EU is, glacially slowly, getting round to the position
| that they need to be in control of their own computing and
| communications infrastructure.
| erk__ wrote:
| The organization EU also has a mastodon instance
| https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
| jwildeboer wrote:
| The EU has been sleeping so much on this that they started
| their own instance quite some time ago and actively communicate
| with the fedizens ;) https://social.network.europa.eu
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| > But why on earth would our institutions be on something they
| don't control?
|
| I imagine is because they think their message will reach more
| people on Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok than on Mastodon.
|
| The fix for this would be for the EU to mandate that Twitter
| and Facebook federate using ActivityPub, in such a way that
| following a Mastodon (etc) account gives that account as much
| reach as an account directly on Twitter/Facebook would have.
|
| As for TikTok, since it's a massive national security risk it
| should just be blocked.
|
| > I do think it's sort of silly that Meta can dictate and
| censor what our elected officials can say on a social media
|
| This is only possible because your elected officials don't have
| the balls to tell Meta to do the right thing.
| Perz1val wrote:
| [flagged]
| didntcheck wrote:
| Then have a rule that the any elected member of the current
| house(s) can have an account. Moderation actions on those
| members should be rare, public, and conducted on the
| authority of the Speaker (or sensible equivalent for the
| political system). Whether the posts should enjoy
| parliamentary privilege, and/or be constrained by the rules
| of "unparliamentary language", is a detail that would need
| working out
|
| Of course this has the downside of losing your account if you
| lose your seat, and not getting one until you're elected, but
| hopefully this will nudge political parties to run their own
| instances for their members
|
| The above would presumably not apply to other accounts like
| the press accounts of a government department. I think
| they/the acting government can police themselves, as they
| currently do with Twitter, and as they've done with
| statements to the press since before computers
| gsatic wrote:
| > This isn't an issue for like 99% of them
|
| That's why 99% don't care or will ever care about mastadon.
| Just like all other EU funded efforts go nowhere.
|
| Social medias main features are - broadcast, Following others
| broadcasts, discovering what's trending. To the general public
| these are already solved problems on existing platforms.
|
| The reason they jump from blog posts to twitter, or Facebook to
| insta or from insta to tiktok is there is a new feature
| available.
|
| Mastadon does nothing new that the 99% think they need. In fact
| the main search results and discovery is a stream of total shit
| compared to other platforms.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| That's why Fediverse apps are awesome, 99% of regular social
| media users are not there. But seriously, I believe their
| strengths are what will make them win in the end:
|
| - Rapid pace of development.
|
| - Focus on users instead of ads or investors.
|
| - You can become a dictator of your own instance, but no one
| gets to be dictator of the Fediverse.
|
| - Bad instances will get shunned by the rest.
|
| Of course, their biggest weakness if funding. So far
| donations can keep up with the small userbase, but the
| userbase will keep growing. Some popular Lemmy instances are
| growing at almost 100 GB per day already.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| >focus on users instead of ads or investors
|
| I remember when we talked about Reddit the same way. We'll
| see if it lasts. I say this as someone who uses Kbin in
| particular a lot. I like it _now_ but we've been down this
| road so many times. It's hard not be skeptical.
|
| They also need to make the relationship between these
| different apps and how it all works easier to digest. And
| some quality 3PA's to fill in the gaps. I think Sync has
| plans to point at Lemmy so here's hoping we see that soon!
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > And some quality 3PA's to fill in the gaps
|
| You mean third-party apps? The passion with which
| developers have been working on Fediverse apps lately is
| humbling. On iOS, the ugly child of open source apps,
| just for Lemmy there's Memmy, and in TestFlight, Mlem,
| Thunder, and LiftOff!. These last are still beta/alpha,
| but Memmy is mature enough to compare with the former
| third-party Reddit clients.
|
| The official Mastodon app recently got a much needed
| upgrade, and there are other good clients like MetaText,
| Ivory, and many more. If anything, there are too many
| choices now, the dust needs to settle.
|
| It's refreshing to see a fundamental questioning of the
| status quo (corporate lordship), and a disrupting and
| viable technology (Fediverse) making strides in the right
| direction.
|
| I might be biased because I remember a diverse Internet
| from before the corporate takeovers, and it seems like
| the Fediverse is attracting older adults who got to
| experience some of that diversity too:
| https://mastodon.art/@jsstaedtler/110668308409683502
| harouiin wrote:
| Mastodon is awesome. It doesn't matter about the 99%. The
| quality of engagement there is far superior and it's a
| platform that respects users.
| sureglymop wrote:
| It's mastodon... With an o!
| timeon wrote:
| > Social medias main features are - broadcast
|
| This features decreased for those platforms recently - since
| they are becoming walled gardens.
|
| That is why for example Slovak railway company switched from
| Twitter to Mastodon this month. More people are on Twitter,
| but that does not matter for some forms of broadcasting, when
| anyone can view content on Mastodon.
| qznc wrote:
| Germany is not too shabby.
|
| https://social.bund.de multiple governmental departments
|
| https://gruene.social and https://spd.social two parties
| currently in government
| mousetree wrote:
| If they want to reach their citizens it makes sense to post on
| the big platforms
| mcsniff wrote:
| Who's citizens (or subjects some might say) are they really,
| if congregation and discourse isn't happening on public
| "property" (in the digital sense of the word)?
| mousetree wrote:
| I'm still a German citizen even if I use the internet
| SllX wrote:
| Facebook might have several billion users but it will never
| be a sovereign nation and even if they were to start
| calling their users "citizens" tomorrow, it would hold no
| weight under any internationally recognized standard or the
| laws of nations.
|
| Sovereign nations and corporations are entirely different
| types of entity with virtually no overlap in real power, so
| you're just muddying the waters to even _imply_ otherwise.
| Even historically powerful corporations like the British
| East India Company found the basis for their authority in a
| nation which eventually revoked their authority, assumed
| its debts and obligations, and took possession of their
| armed forces, equipment, claimed lands and authority and
| disestablished the corporation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > two which are owned by two American billionaires
|
| Meta is owned by public investors (plenty of whom are in the
| EU), nobody has a majority stake.
| blitzar wrote:
| While Zuckerberg owns just 13 percent of Meta's stock, he
| controls 61.1 percent of the vote because of the company's
| voting structure.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Huh - TIL.
|
| Those sort of arrangements should be illegal imo
| sylware wrote:
| Don't forget, expect the worse when you go alternative to Big
| Tech: Expect Big Tech to shadow-hire teams of hackers to destroy
| your public servers.
|
| Namely, when going alternative to Big Tech, be sure you have real
| and solid "cybersecurity" teams in place. They will have to work
| with IAPs, datacenters, carrier transit providers, have excessive
| monitoring in place to detect intruders (almost military grade).
|
| Those teams will have HUGE powers, they must be limited to
| securing the quality and availability of the service, NO MORE.
| keskival wrote:
| In practice this hasn't been a problem so far. While I agree
| the incentive is there to sabotage and corrupt, the competence
| doesn't seem to be.
| [deleted]
| Pxtl wrote:
| This is why I'm hopeful that Threads will federate with Mastodon
| instances. It just makes sense to have companies and governments
| and other institutions run their own private mastodon instances,
| and us vast unwashed people who just want a free place to read
| the news and shitpost to follow on a site like Threads where
| advertising dollars cover the costs of servers and moderation.
| There's no reason that eg the BBC should be posting on somebody
| else's infrastructure, but it's obviously of benefit to both the
| BBC and Threads to have Threads users to be able to follow and
| boost posts from BBC's staff.
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| Hopeful? Didn't the Threads announcement literally state they
| were going to federate with Mastodon?
|
| > Soon, we are planning to make Threads compatible with
| ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by
| the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for
| the open standards that power the modern web. This would make
| Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the
| ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress
|
| > We're committed to giving you more control over your audience
| on Threads - our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide
| you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content
| to another service
|
| https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-ap...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Yes, but there's a lot of resistance in the Mastodon
| community about it. I know Threads is making it a goal but
| there's a lot that can go wrong between now and then.
| danijelb wrote:
| Resistance from Mastodon enthusiasts doesn't matter.
| Governments and companies can still decide to run their own
| ActivityPub infrastructure, running on Mastodon or
| something else. Threads and other services will federate
| with them, users will be able to follow accounts from those
| government and company instances.
|
| Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but
| they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub
| takes off.
| keskival wrote:
| I agree otherwise except on the missing out a lot part.
|
| I haven't defederated Threads on my instance as it has so
| far not become a problem. They can easily become one if
| they for example start pushing up ads into the stream.
|
| Most Mastodon users have what they want, they aren't
| really missing out on anything. Except ads and spying
| mainly.
| danijelb wrote:
| I agree for ads - I don't think it would be acceptable to
| push ads to other servers. I'm not sure if it's even
| possible in the standard because they'd have to have some
| sort of an ad account, but if the user on your instance
| is not following that account they'd never see the ad.
|
| As for missing out, I guess it's a matter of perspective.
| I would assume that right now most Mastodon users have at
| least one more account on a mainstream corporate social
| media site - Twitter, Instagram, whatever. What they are
| missing out from Mastodon, they get on other places.
|
| But if we imagine a scenario where ActivityPub becomes
| mainstream and all providers start supporting it, there
| are two totally different experiences.
|
| An experience of a person on a server that federates with
| everyone could mean having just one account and follow
| everything from one place. For example Twitter would
| support ActivityPub so you can follow Twitter users
| without an account there. You could follow a Youtube
| channel and have it in your feed. The owner of the
| channel wouldn't need to create a separate account on
| Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, or something - their
| channel is their followable account on all platforms.
|
| The experience of a person on a small mastodon server
| that defederates from big corporate servers would be
| exactly as is today. To follow users of Instagram,
| Twitter, Threads, Youtube, etc you'd maintain another
| account. But in the future where ActivityPub is
| mainstream, that other account is also activitypub-
| compatible. So, why have two when one is less "powerful"
| than the other?
|
| Letting the imagination run wild, in such future scenario
| ActivityPub feeds could be integrated deeply into your
| iOS/Android phone UI, without needing a separate app.
| Perhaps also on TV. Most people will want an account that
| doesn't limit them.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Dutch government adopting Mastodon is a notable step towards the
| Web of Nations.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| [dead]
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| I don't really understand this.
|
| Is this a state-operated social network for its citizens or is it
| a public announcements platform?
|
| Because if it's PA then going with Mastodon seems pretty
| excessive
| epimenov wrote:
| It makes sense really. About a week ago there was "code red"
| storm in the Netherlands, and first phone alarm contained
| something along the lines of "for more details see this Twitter
| account".
|
| Then they removed any mention of twitter from from the second
| message.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Doesn't sound like they needed a microblogging platform, just
| a web page that could be easily updated. Their use of Twitter
| in the first place would appear to be the crux of the
| problem.
| mcluck wrote:
| Twitter has a built in notification system. People can
| subscribe to get alerts from it. Theoretically people can
| do that with RSS but, let's be honest, most people don't
| use RSS. I saw in another comment that they do have an RSS
| feed though if that's your cup of tea
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| 1. if the tweet was from someone outside of the government
| then creating a mastodon instance does not make any sense
|
| 2. if the tweet was from the government then why couldn't
| they also put up something on a webpage on their own sites?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >2. if the tweet was from the government then why couldn't
| they also put up something on a webpage on their own sites?
|
| IIUC, they did. That website being
| https://social.overheid.nl/
|
| Or am I missing something?
| neogodless wrote:
| The source of the tweet isn't the issue at play.
|
| The tweet / Twitter is the issue.
|
| A Mastodon instance is something the issuer of the message
| controls. Twitter is not.
|
| Web sites don't "notify" people of content, but social
| media does.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Usually the way public announcements work is that you write one
| post and some intermediate service posts it everywhere for you.
| It's not that crazy to add a new service, and this is probably
| in response to Twitter getting rate limited.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| but the problem is that Mastodon is not a service. they could
| just as well have deployed a static website with RSS feeds.
|
| also the fact that they allow other users on the instance
| seems pretty strange. shouldn't the only accounts be from the
| government members?
| tastroder wrote:
| There are only official persons/entity accounts on that
| instance, if you're thinking about the global feed that's
| just a composition of people those accounts follow.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They also have that. https://www.government.nl/rss
| deepakg wrote:
| The municipality of Amsterdam have been doing this (i.e. running
| their own Mastodon instance) as well since Jan this year:
| https://social.amsterdam.nl/@gemeenteamsterdam
| nologic01 wrote:
| Its wonderful to sense the giant wheels of technology adoption
| turning, even at a glacial pace.
|
| The public sector should endorse, invest in, and wherever
| appropriate use public goods and open source.
|
| Best success with the initiative. Dont look back, there is
| nothing there but greed and manipulation.
| [deleted]
| boredumb wrote:
| I guess I never really took much of a liking to twitter either,
| but Mastodon doesn't do anything for me. I really hate big social
| media, but the mastodon feels like twitter and quora had an ugly
| baby that everyone is obligated to pretend is cute.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Something Mastodon the software needs are theme-able templates,
| like Wordpress/CMS themes, I think.
|
| We see more and more specialised instances by institutions, but
| they all have the same default look. Themes could integrate
| theses instances into the default corporate design while keeping
| the functionality the same.
| keskival wrote:
| You can very easily fork the codebase. In fact, that's the
| current way to lift up the post character limit on your
| instance. It's not difficult to do that. In fact, if you can't
| do that, you probably shouldn't be running a Mastodon instance,
| unless for learning purposes.
| antimora wrote:
| 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
| pphysch wrote:
| I strongly believe that you _should be able_ to have a
| government-backed, federated ID. It 's crazy that digital
| citizenship hasn't really arrived in a meaningful way (in
| America) and instead we have to be digital-feudal subjects of
| various privately-run corporations, or lurk in the shadows of the
| Internet via anonymity and good opsec.
|
| Whether everyone _must_ have one is an entirely different debate.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > I strongly believe that you should be able to have a
| government-backed, federated ID.
|
| No thank you. This sort of thing will eventually become
| compelled and made into a series of regulations in the name of
| "safety", etc.
|
| > lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good
| opsec.
|
| This is a feature, not a bug. Anonymitity is extremely
| important for many people.
| gochi wrote:
| It's not an either or. More people are handling important
| tasks through the internet it's time we all step up and take
| that more seriously. We can do so without losing anonymity.
|
| Negating this won't keep you anonymous, we're already being
| tracked at every possible avenue with profiles created on us
| the second we open a website or app. We can either tackle
| this head on by taking ID seriously online on our terms
| (necessary E2EE, full ID can never be accessed, it's not
| stored in a central database, etc), or we can let most
| corporations continue to trade our profiles around for
| funsies while acting like our pseudonyms will protect us.
| pphysch wrote:
| As I said, anonymity should always be an option.
|
| But it should also be an option to engage in platforms where
| anonymous spammers, trolls, and criminals are not feasible,
| where reputation matters and some level of social integrity
| can be restored. And ideally without a secretive corporation
| exploiting your attention and data for their profits.
|
| I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies") is
| vastly larger than the group of people who actually _need_
| anonymity.
| joiqj wrote:
| Once an electronic ID is created it will be enforced,
| perhaps even to log into the internet, and anonymity won't
| be an option.
|
| The EU busybodies are not your friends.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies")
| is vastly larger than the group of people who actually need
| anonymity.
|
| I just don't think that's true. Many people have opinions
| that will lead them to being attacked and cancelled, etc.
| There are groups of people ready to isolate and pounce on
| whoever they can so as to compel others to shut-up.
|
| I get what you're saying but I don't agree that government
| has a place in regulating speech. People are free to join
| or leave platforms as they see fit.
| xorcist wrote:
| Anything resembling a modern society is built on identity.
|
| How would you access a bank account anonymously?
|
| How would you file your taxes anonymously?
|
| Get an education? Acquire (legal) drugs? Buy a house? Travel
| abroad (and back again)?
|
| Most countries have a way to provide identity to provide the
| above services. Passports are an internationally federated
| system, but there is no equivalent for digital signatures.
|
| This is a problem when you want to study or work abroad, or
| receive pension from abroad, or any of a dozen other real
| world situations that regularly causes headaches for normal
| people.
| collegeburner wrote:
| nope, if we create an easy mechanism to force someone to prove
| he's one real government-identified person then sites will
| gradually require it.
|
| suspended from twitter? can't create another account cause you
| only have one id!
|
| want to share something anonymously to avoid getting fired or
| investigated by feds? tough, you're required to sign in with
| your MyID to keep everyone safe!
|
| the only way to prevent this is to not build it and vote out
| anyone who tries to create it.
|
| government ruins and abuses everything it touches, we have a
| consistent pattern of behavior to go off here
|
| we should actually be moving in the opposite direction.
|
| i shouldn't have to prove i'm anyone basically ever, except for
| taxes and census.
|
| not for planes or trains or buying liquor.
|
| driving can be licensed but should be an "anonymous license",
| like "i'm driver #9238" not "i'm fred the licensed driver".
|
| and those numbers ("driver number", ssn) should be barred from
| use as identification for any other purpose with massive
| penalties.
|
| here's the moral reason why: forcing ID creates tools for
| administering punishment/"accountability", but it does this in
| advance of something being judged as wrongdoing. basically
| prior restraint on a mass scale. and when the government
| promulgates ID technologies it promulgates tools for this abuse
| of liberty.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Are you sure you really want a Digital IDs as China does?.
| nerdbert wrote:
| Are you really sure you want running water like China has?
| pphysch wrote:
| Why not? Should we shun good ideas because they can be
| associated with the current Big Bad?
|
| You could just as easily have pointed to Ukraine or other
| Good Western Democracies countries that also have forms of
| digital citizenship.
| vidarh wrote:
| The EU/EEA has eIDAS which requires providers to recognise
| electronic IDs issued across the EEA to some extent.
|
| Since I'm in the UK ( _grumble_ _grumble_ Brexit) I haven 't
| kept up that much despite being a Norwegian citizen, but in
| some countries at least this in theory IDs issued to certain
| standards by private actors. E.g. Norway has MinID (government
| issued), BankID (bank issued, also allows bank logins),
| Commfides and BuyPass, all of which issues id's that you can
| use to log in or sign with that tie your signature to the
| Norwegian national ID number.
|
| Many of the countries makes extensive use of these IDs. E.g. in
| Norway you can log in to most government services with any of
| the recognised providers, and can sign contracts and even
| marriage licenses with them.
|
| Interestingly Norway and Estonia appears to be the only two
| countries that have submitted more than one eID scheme to the
| European Commission for acceptance across the EEA, and
| interestingly for Norway both of them are privately provided;
| the (lower security) government run ID scheme has not been
| submitted:
|
| https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...
| _delirium wrote:
| The German federal government also operates a mastodon server,
| which a number of ministries and governmental organizations use:
| https://social.bund.de/public/local
| btbuildem wrote:
| That seems like a really good idea, actually - and in line with
| the federated approach. A server represents some scope of
| authority, in this case it's the national government. If you are
| looking for information coming from that organization, here is
| the indisputable source.
| izzydata wrote:
| Honestly I think this makes a lot more sense than Twitter. It
| always felt wrong to me that Twitter was used for anything
| resembling official communication. Whether it be a local news
| network, fire station, local government or the president of the
| United States. All on the same platform that is filled to the
| brim with pornography and obscenities. Of course you can curate
| your feed and only follow what you want, but in my mind Twitter
| is a single website. I'm used to dedicated forums so when Twitter
| rolled around I figured it would just be a little bit bigger, but
| still mostly informal, unofficial people goofing off online. Once
| everyone and everything started using it I left. I don't want to
| mix online identities with real life identities.
|
| So, despite Mastodon being a federated system it makes a lot more
| sense to use a dedicated instance for official purposes like this
| to me. I imagine they don't federate with anything anyway and
| don't even allow account creation.
| callalex wrote:
| It terrifies me how many USA cities and counties use Twitter
| for their mass emergency broadcasts, since Twitter has now
| proven itself to be unreliable for even reads. My city pays a
| company (Nixle) to send out mass SMS and Email, but all it
| contains is a link to a tweet instead of any actionable
| information.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| That must have been frustrating when twitter went behind a
| login wall.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Why not just use a website? What advantage do citizens get by
| going to a social media site to keep a pulse on govt comms?
| nerdbert wrote:
| I am not going to go to 41 different government agency
| websites every day just to see if they want to tell me
| something important.
|
| But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all
| their updates in one place.
| rakoo wrote:
| Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be
| bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and
| discussed more easily
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and
| personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms
|
| Or rely on each website to format the messages in
| consistently good UX, typography, etc.
|
| Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social
| network concepts like hashtags
|
| Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to
| approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al
|
| Or remove the ability to see conversations between government
| entities natively supported by @ mentions.
| DavideNL wrote:
| It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves:
| https://social.overheid.nl/public/local
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion
| and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often
| the agencies do also that - for presenting more static
| information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of
| discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread".
|
| A conventional web-site is good for distributing static
| information whereas a social media site is good for
| broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more
| static) information.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch
| government's website every day to see what's going on with
| the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested
| to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the
| European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon
| instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I
| certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's
| horrible website, tho.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and
| a life workflow to check it only to approximate the
| aggregation feature already a first class feature of a
| social media platform.
|
| Let's remember the general public are not the same users as
| "us"
| bloopernova wrote:
| Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging
| platform.
| andsoitis wrote:
| My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now
| you're asking citizens to go to two different places to
| seek out information instead of one.
|
| Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on:
| their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon,
| etc.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Well, usually governments don't just have one website.
| Different entities use different channels for official
| communications + Twitter which is the one everyone reads.
| Why not have a governments official mastodon for the
| governments official communication interoperable with the
| network everyone else is on?
| vidarh wrote:
| People go to a gov website when they know they need to
| get information or get something done. Social media is a
| way to _push information out_ about new policies etc.
|
| Governments have whole departments dedicated to getting
| the word out about things because _people_ aren 't all in
| one place. This is not a big additional effort but it is
| different in two essential way: They control it, and it
| has APIs anyone can connect to, including to bridge
| elsewhere.
| bob-09 wrote:
| You can ask citizens to go to your website to stay
| informed, but they will turn around and complain that
| nobody told them about X,Y,Z because they're not
| naturally going to the website on a regular basis unless
| they have an immediate need. Elected officials will turn
| on you and blame you for not meeting the citizens where
| they already are.
| [deleted]
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They already do.
|
| Government has found it easier to go where the people are
| than to try to lead the people to water they won't drink.
| gochi wrote:
| Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the
| usual methods of government officials making accounts on
| every network. Negating the entire original comment about
| how this "makes more sense than Twitter".
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Twitter was rate limiting people and those people
| affected could not see government posts if they exceeded
| their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite
| reasonable.
|
| Several government entities where I am left after the
| blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to
| impersonate the official accounts.
| gochi wrote:
| None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have
| done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't
| federated.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| "They could have done the same on Facebook or any other
| network that they don't control and can't rely on"
|
| They can however control a Mastodon instance, and
| starting one is a off-the-shelf operation now.
|
| Another poster described it as "problems of governments
| relying on the whims of tech players in getting these
| messages out" which is exactly right. Those other
| platforms might have decided today not to show you the
| emergency warning unless you have an account and are
| logged in and have watched some ads first.
|
| It is - for good reason - conventional wisdom that in
| order to get a message out thoroughly, you have
| "outposts" on _all_ the media that you don't own
| (including Facebook and twitter) and push content to
| there, but the "home base" is not on some platform where
| it can be locked, rate-limited or taken from you at the
| whim of some other company in some other country.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| They are there too. https://www.government.nl/contact
|
| I think the more pressing thing is that they want to get
| anyone affected by Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar
| type of service. I'm sure they're evaluating Threads as
| we speak.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the
| government should use for communication. This also avoids the
| question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS
| feed.
| DavideNL wrote:
| Mastodon also provides an rss feed.
|
| " _You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just
| adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile
| URL._"
|
| https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
| izzydata wrote:
| If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a
| format people can already understand and is dynamically
| configurable to do what they want now and could change in the
| future.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the
| site to do website type of things, but you don't want to
| visit daily in case there's an update.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that
| the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and
| maintained by the public, i.e. the government.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly
| priced, compared to large org budgets
|
| https://masto.host/pricing/
| cmelbye wrote:
| The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along
| with posts from other sources rather than having to visit
| many different websites individually. It's easier to consume,
| the same reason why RSS was useful.
| gochi wrote:
| This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are
| constantly splitting themselves around different social
| networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user
| it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another
| account to join the fediverse, then another for threads,
| then another for facebook, list goes on for each network
| that pops up and gains usage.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss
|
| Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It
| has to be "all of the above" because no one method of
| distribution captures everybody
| cmelbye wrote:
| That's the hard part about standards. I'm not sure how a
| standard can become one without people taking a chance on
| it.
|
| Case in point: You actually do not need to create another
| account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard.
| Citizens will be able to follow information from the
| Dutch government on that platform.
| gochi wrote:
| Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the
| dutch government on threads. Which kind of illuminates my
| point, for this to become standard we need far better
| implementation details than what activitypub currently
| describes. Until that happens, this is just another
| "social network" to join and keep up with, or ignoring it
| entirely to rely on some other social network.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Technically, they need an instagram account to follow
| the dutch government on threads.
|
| I think that's a misunderstanding or two. An
| Instagram/Threads account is one potential way "to follow
| the Dutch government" - actually this is hypothetical, as
| the threads/mastodon interop is also hypothetical at
| present, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36669480 .
|
| An account on any public mastodon server is a second way
| to follow the Dutch government, and should work today
| much better than the first way. it doesn't need to be "on
| threads".
|
| GETing the correct rss feed url on their mastodon server
| is a third way. You don't even need a mastodon account or
| any other account, but you have to "pull" the content,
| it's not pushed to your feed.
|
| Finding out which other social media they broadcast to
| and following them there is possibly a fourth way.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are
| constantly splitting themselves around different social
| networks.
|
| The social media department of any large org would have
| active accounts on all of the social media in order to
| get a message out. That's how it is already, not sure
| what your objection to mastodon, where they own the
| instance, is.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push
| notifications / etc.
|
| A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts,
| comments to posts, etc. Right?
| didntcheck wrote:
| Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using
| Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that
| looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully
| not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem.
| _And_ RSS, of course
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted
| happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites
| (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site
| you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations
| about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they
| become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a
| moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment
| officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server
| and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-
| hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS
| and even allows those government officials to follow and
| interact with other accounts in an official capacity.
|
| Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the
| web.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Wordpress for one to many.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?
| vidarh wrote:
| You can see from the fact that there are replies from other
| instances that they do federate. It'd make little sense not to,
| as if they didn't people wouldn't be able to follow them.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| Do they federate with anybody or are they selective? Who
| makes those decisions, based on what? This seems like a can
| of worms to me.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'm not sure which part of federation it is that makes you
| think there's a reason for them to be selective.
|
| The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance
| can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with
| undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty
| much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on
| any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by
| the public.
|
| I'm _a bit_ surprised that they allow public access to the
| federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it
| potentially could get embarrassing w /respect to people who
| don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there,
| so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down.
|
| [1] https://social.overheid.nl/public
| seti0Cha wrote:
| That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose
| to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty
| normal for servers to refuse to federate with other
| servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but
| if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced
| to choose which side to take.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >That's exactly the reason I was thinking they may choose
| to be selective. From what I understand, it's pretty
| normal for servers to refuse to federate with other
| servers. I don't know if they do this transitively, but
| if so, then the Dutch government might find itself forced
| to choose which side to take.
|
| I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which
| side to take."
|
| You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on
| that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the
| submission _only_ has accounts for the Dutch government
| and elected officials of that government.
|
| Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on
| the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any
| moderation decisions made by the site. _Only those with
| accounts on that instance_ would be affected by blocks
| /bans of specific users or instances.
|
| And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block
| other instances from their users, there's nothing
| stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies)
| from creating accounts on other instances.
|
| As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a
| side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The
| Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the
| way it should be for a site like this?
|
| As such, please explain what you mean.
|
| Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.
| vidarh wrote:
| The issue is that if they're selective they'll prevent
| Dutch citizens from following government accounts. Most
| places it'd be deeply problematic if the government
| started blocking access for constituents without good
| reason.
|
| They can (and probably should) only show their federated
| feed to users of their instance, and they can _silence_
| other instances to prevent posts from making it into
| their federated feed even if someone follows accounts
| there, but defederation would likely be an extreme last
| resort for a government server.
| petercammeraat wrote:
| Are there more governments and/or organisations that have their
| own Mastodon instance?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| The EU has one (social.network.europa.eu), as well as a
| PeerTube instance (tube.network.europa.eu).
|
| Germany has social.bund.de as well as a couple of public
| service broadcasters (like ZDF who run zdf.social).
| Sunspark wrote:
| Server threw a "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" and appears
| to be very slow at the moment.
|
| For a government server, they sure didn't allocate much in terms
| of resources.
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