1y ago

Dutch government starts own Mastodon instance as reaction to the instability of Twitter

https://social.overheid.nl/@beheerder

259 comments

I hope other governments, small and large, start doing this.
- 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.
  Absolutely. I was on an instance, run by North Americans, that had blocked European Govt instances because they didn’t trust government agencies spying on them etc. Some German users picked up on this and voiced a lot of frustration over it. There was a clear cultural divide. Even more ironic, I think it was the German department of privacy or something to that effect.
  Nonetheless, it was quite interesting to see a tension between the small hacker aspect of the fediverse and the “this is the new internet” aspect and how much the US dominated perspective probably completely missed the mark.
  EDIT: European Govt from “European” to clarify I was referring to government run instances.
  
  ARD and ZDF too, probably just as significant because they're some of the biggest media organisations in the world: https://ard.social/explore and https://zdf.social/about
  
  With the internet being so dominated by american voices,
  Europe has to build something new that isn't a big corp, that isn't centralized. It has to find its own way, and the Fediverse model is a good beginning. It's to show we can do something but in the European spirit.
  
  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?
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  This isn’t that though. Running a federated service instance is more akin to them having to abide by the rule of the people than the status quo where Musk or Zuck could boot them from their platform or hide anything they don’t like without any reason at all.
  In the fediverse, they’re choosing to run a self-hosted outlet that can interact with other privately or publicly run services. It’s like them choosing to run their own email servers instead of their officials all using gmail accounts.
  The free market solutions have just led to unelected billionaire oligarchs controlling the narrative. With this federated stuff, no single entity can control the narrative (once all the kinks are ironed out like vote manipulation, exploits, etc)
  
  would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people
  you mean like facebook? haha!
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Yeah all of this free market media we're enjoying is the real height of journalistic integrity and quality
  
  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.
  
  free market and rules of the people in one sentence?

This is great. This is how it always should have been.
Organization of any kind needs a Twitter page or subreddit? No, they need their own official, self-controlled Mastodon instance anyone can see and listen to and interact with, even without accounts on that specific instance. They need their own kbin or Lemmy instance to make and administer their community on and have control over, everyone can still participate even without signing up for accounts on that specific instance.
- You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you. Well, small unprofessional companies do, but everyone else has a domain, website, mail server and all the usual internet infrastructure in place. Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance. For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.
  
  Eh, lots of companies use gmail it's just masked by being their own domain and part of g suite.
  
  You don’t see governments or companies using gmail, now do you.
  Many definitely do use it. But now that many have moved towards microsoft and/or google cloud services (mostly pushed by the private sector), people are indeed noticing that maybe, it's not the best idea for public institutions to be dependent on foreign corporations.
  Why should companies and governments use TweetBook or Snapstargram for official communication when they can host their own instance.
  Well because "cloud is the future" and hosting your own instances is not "cost effective".
  For the time being, the problem has been that large majority of the people are using these unstable platforms, so companies decided to follow.
  Big tech companies have been fighting for the dependency of the private sector for decades. Even before the cloud, there was a dependency on windows, Microsoft office and exchange. Now big tech is selling the promise that "they will take care of everything, you don't need a ton of IT employees who administer everything, microsoft/google will take care of everything".
  
  tons of large companies use gmail lol

They've done a lot of stupid things lately, but this isn't one of them.
Governments should be using open platforms and open source software.
- Absolutely! Using open source software is much cheaper, as well. Hiring developers to work on open source software/OSs would cost less than buying software annually. Governments pay stupid amounts of money for easily replaceable software.
- I'm from Indonesia and I can assure you European level of stupid doesn't even come close to my country's
- Why. So they become less secure? Propriatery software has its uses /s
  
  Yes and how is the developer supposed to earn their money when they can't spy on people and insert ads1111
- It would be nice if governments could make a "software union", pledging to use the same standards. It seems that everyone is inventing the wheel separately in every country or falling back on commercial industry standards.
  F.i. the exchange of financial documents. There's a standard coming along called SAF-T, and even if it is a standard, every country using it are making their own definitions of what it is. There are also some countries that already have their own completely different standard. The crazy thing is that almost every country worldwide are asking for the exact same info on tax returns, but they've all individually come up with that. Only differences is the order of fields on the form.
  Same with user identification. Every country has their own almost identical solution for identification, which however does not work across borders, despite the similarities.

Beautiful.
Governments should embrace open source infrastructure and empower it against corporate high-tech.

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 @news@cnn.social or something. Then Wolf could have @Wolf.Blitzer@cnn.social.
Instant “verification” that way, too.
But we’ll see.
- Wow. Decentralization as a whole will be a game changer for all corners of media, science etc.
- Given how the fediverse is kinda like e-mail, this feels like a natural next step.
- 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.
- I had the same exact thoughts when the first twitter migration happened. I doubt we will see it, but I can dream.
- Does CNN already own that domain?
  
  For some crazy reason they haven't snatched it up yet. Atleast a domain seller website is saying it is free for pickings, if you want it.
  Then again maybe their policy is to put everything as subdomain on cnn.com and make cnn.com their sole brand "if it's not on cnn.com, it's not that CNN". Still i would have though they defensive register all relevant TLDs, even if they never ever use them.
  
  I have no idea. That’s just an example.
- 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.
- Agreed, not sure how I feel about governments setting up their own servers, but news organizations definitely.
  
  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
  
  Only employees can have an account on those servers. Registration is not open to the public.

That's actually hilarious because the coalition of ruling parties of the Netherlands was so unstable that it fell apart today.
- Oh dang, our government has fallen and I first read about it on Lemmy. It’s official, this is my social medium now.
- @bluezephyr @quinten
  Is there a local article about this? I'm very curious
  
  Einde kabinet-Rutte IV - https://nos.nl/collectie/13942

Its super important that Government info NOT be hidden behind paywalls, forced log-ins or even CloudFlare puzzles. People need to be able to freely click through to the official information.

Imagine a world where every government has its own instance.
"Breaking News: North Korea has defederated from the United States, as well as hundreds of other countries."
- "The Russian federation defederated Ukraine."
  
  You claim to be a federation, yet you've shown that you are actually a defederation.
  
  More like it tried to forcibly merge the instances
  
  "The Russian federation defederates itself."
- i'll take country defederation dramas over the shit we have now any day.
- Nah they're too petty for that. They'd make a huge show about how they're going to block the US and everyone else. Then they'll block.
  Then they'll quietly unblock everyone.
  Three months later they'll do all over again.
  
  This is just discord in a nutshell

Excellent use case.

This actually makes a lot of sense and I am surprised that there isn't a lot of government already doing it. That and celebrities. It's basically instant verification.

Not many governments would have enough tech-savy people to even think of opening a Mastadon instance. Kudos NL and Germany!
- a lot of government has one, they're just not paid enough
  
  I would think that, more than anything else, the issue would be more getting it through all the bureaucratic red tape. See the ESB debacle:
  Weaver had been brought to Raytheon, the company the Air Force had hired to write the software for the next generation GPS satellites, because the Raytheon team was behind schedule and over budget. This issue of data transmission to the ground stations and back again was one of a few problems that was holding them back. There is an industry standard way of doing this, a simple, reliable protocol that is built into almost every operating system in the world.
  But this team wasn’t using this simple protocol on its own. Instead, the team had written a piece of software to receive the message from that protocol, read the data, and then recode it into a different format, so they could feed it into a very complex piece of software called an Enterprise Service Bus, or ESB. The ESB eventually delivered the data to yet another piece of software, at which point the whole process ran in reverse order to deliver it back to the original, simple protocol. Because the data was taking such a roundabout route, it wasn’t arriving quickly enough for the ground stations to make the calculations needed. Using the simple protocol alone would have made the entire job a snap—as easy as nailing a couple of boards together. Instead, they had this massive Rube Goldberg contraption that was never going to work.
  The people on this project knew quite well that using this ESB was a terrible idea. They’d have been relieved to just throw it out, plug in the simple protocol, and move on. But they couldn’t. It was a requirement in their contract. The contracting officers had required it because a policy document called the Air Force Enterprise Architecture had required it. The Air Force Enterprise Architecture required it because the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture required it. And the DoD Enterprise Architecture required it because the Federal Enterprise Architecture, written by the Chief Information Officers Council, convened by the White House at the request of Congress, had required it.
  I'm sure some of the fine folks at 18F would love to help various US agencies or state governments with migrating to Mastodon. I'm not so sure any of them would be able to convince geriatric politicians to do so.

The fact that a state government used a commercial service to inform the public is absurd, and this was bound to happen eventually.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  They could have used a mailing list or an rss feed or half a dozen other solutions that don't require a special website or government app.
  
  i can get alerts on my phone from the government. plus you could have people sign up for text messages rather then follow om Twitter. I get that Twitter wasca super fast way to get announcements out to the public and it would go to the people that actually care. But itvis bad for vital communication line to be own by a third party that can't make money since what happens when it shuts down
- 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).
  
  At least posting on Twitter is free (for now).
  "For now", is right. That isn't always the case.
- You think they own the servers?

This is really fascinating to me. It would be interesting to see each country set up their own Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/other federated systems and have those instances constantly talk to each other. Like others have commented, It seems like a great way to keep the communication style and interaction of twitter/facebook, while also protecting the validity of the information through private instances. Really smart decision.
- I'd be interested to see other organisations get involved too. For instance, instead of every news website having their own comments section, why not set up a Lemmy instance? They could post links to their articles and users can comment with their Fediverse account, posting could be limited to users from that server, and sign-up could be restricted to people who work there.
  
  There are a lot of ways they could handle it. Imagine the New York Times or similar organizations with their own customized Mastodon for live updates and Lemmy for linking to articles and for searching. Mastodon being the free to follow and the Lemmy/main site being subscription to make an account and comment.

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.

in the future:
"Ireland.ir and Scot.land has defederated from the England.UK.gov. The Prime minister will be addressing his Instance shortly"

Exciting to see this happening. More governments should do this.

Incredible! Are they the first government entity to do so?
- No, EU and Germany have been in Mastodon for months.
  
  On Mastodon or their own instances?
  
  Oh shit, I did hear about that. Completely forgot, thank you!
- The EU started their own instance when Musk bought Twitter
- Truth Social is technically a Mastodon instance but it was made by Trump and company after he was in office so it was not used for official communications from the US government.
  
  sigh

Lol that’s awesome! I didn’t think governments would start doing that so quickly.
- otvis great news. the use of Twitter by governments is why Twitter got so famous and could really punch above it's weight class. Now I hope this Gaines momentum

Didn't the EU do the same shortly after Space Karen bought Twitter? I believe I saw an article around the time I started my Mastodon account.
- https://social.network.europa.eu/
  https://tube.network.europa.eu/
  Took about two weeks from Musk's announcement for those instances to show up.

Good, other governments should be doing this. (But even if they use threads instead, mastodon users’ll see their updates anyway if mastodon feds with it)
- threads will never federate.
  
  Threads might, but it's more what instances will federate with threads - I think government and news organisations would do well to federate for better reach - that way any announcements they send out can have the largest reach possible. However major and minor mastodon user instances should probably not do so in order to prevent issues with takeover and EEE
  
  !remindme 1 year
  
  You think it was just a fake promise? I haven't thought about it, but it's certainly possible.

Can wait to see mass adoption of fediverse over other countries to provide updates

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.

https://www.overheid.nl/english
Overheid.nl is the central access point to all information about government organisations of the Netherlands.

I would love US governments / states to start their own instance on the fediverse. Talk about explosive growth to this community.

Can't wait for it to be overrun by germans.
- They're not going to have open signups. It's government agencies only. Not that there's technically anything stopping Germans from joining the PR departments of our government agencies…
  
  Oh just give it about three days…
  Preußens Gloria intensifies. Ü

Can I follow that from Lemmy?
- Don't think so, also not sure how Mastodon feeds work with Lemmy as they aren't really upvoted/downvoted on. Though the opposite works where you can follow communities/accounts from Mastodon.
  
  Does that mean having a Mastodon account is better than having a lemmy account. (Cause one can follow the other but not the other way around...)
- I saw someone post on Lemmy using their mastodon account
  
  Posting to lemmy through mastodon is a thing (hello there!), but yeah, I don’t think you can follow a mastodon account through lemmy unfortunately.
  EDIT: I lied! Found the server admin I think at this link: https://lemmy.ml/u/beheerder@social.overheid.nl but I think they need to specifically post to a lemmy server in order to have posts show.

Damn a government that actually do something in terms of digitilization.
Cries in German …
- It's weird that you use Germany as an example when Germany has been on Mastodon since 2020 at https://social.bund.de!
  
  TIL that I am a proud German citizen. Our government is leading the digital transition in Europe. 🇩🇪
  
  Wait that is also government based?

This is brilliant. I hope we see more countries doing the same thing :)
Maybe they could make accounts be tied to residency or citizenship, and perhaps have communities that only allow posting to those accounts to reduce bot spam and foreign meddling. Maybe that's a terrible idea, but it will be interesting to see where this goes, and if activity pub will be sufficient or need extending.
- If I understood this correct from my interpretation of the dutch server description this is an Instance for dutch government officials.
  At least Germany also has such a mastodon instance too for quite a while now. So people on mastodon know that an account there is officially a government account. The BSI (German Office for cyber security) and other offices post there.
  This is not an Instance for "normal people" to register on.
  
  Yeah, this works great for the "speaking officially" context.
  
  I've always imagined federation would allow service providers to own their communication channels. Municipalities, state agencies, etc.
  
  This can make it so much more secure for governments than Twitter, it also removes Elon or whoever from being able to bias algorithms in favour of his favourites.
  I really think this is going to be the standard for companies and governments

Please note that this server does not accept refugees from Twitter and the admins will collapse if you ask them too.

One of the best parts of this - especially if the trend continues - is that it makes the "Extinguish" part of a possible "Embrace, Expand, Extinguish" attack by Meta's Threads more difficult.
Cutting off access to a bunch of tiny self-hosted private instances won't even ping on their radar. But cutting off federation with official government platforms? That's different.

UK government has been taken over by WhatsApp and Twitter - our official inquiries have to beg for access to WhatsApp to see what's going on in gov. Love to see them switch - they could have more control of data retention and promote innovation.
- Oh man... UK is so f* up right now. Hope times get better for you soon.

wait i thought they don't have a government at the moment
- "Government" is a pretty broad term. It encompasses both elected or ruling leaders that implement policy (politics), as well as the administrative beaurocracy that implements whatever policy is enacted day to day. It's pretty typical for the beaurocracy to continue functioning under whatever mandate they have and even to make their own descisions if the mandate gives them that latitude, even if the leadership part of the government is being changed or otherwise non-functional.
  
  Understand. I was simply joking.

Poggers

Working link: https://social.overheid.nl/@beheerder/110684642686045200
"This instance has been technically up and running since Friday, July 7, but not yet officially in use. Please be patient
The instance will contain the accounts of government agencies and will not currently accommodate individual officials."
translated by google translate.
- thank you for the working link, was starting to wonder whether something was broken on my side

I want to see Canada next!

Great news!

Italy will follow soon 🤥
- And all other EU countries. Then crimew.gay will defederate them all later.

Damn, sometimes I'm proud of our government .. until you realize its just a bunch of fuckups in one room!

Probably a poor decision to be creating accounts on government operated instances. Since they own the server, they're in a position to:
Siphon credentials and attempt reuse to gain access to distinct services
Ban individual accounts
Censor based on post content
I'm all for government support and adoption of open-source software so long as they're not in the position to disrupt how it's used by the public at large.
Edit (my perspective is relevant, but doesn't apply in this case): My nerd impulses outran my willingness to read the link's content. Seems it's not for public registration.
Edit 2: Like my cornbread eating American ass can read Dutch anyway 🤣
- This is going to be a private instance. No normal citizens can create an account.
  It's a response to Twitter shielding access to unregistered users. A lot of public services used Twitter to spread information.
  
  And this is how all Governmental instances have to be, private. Mastodon is a great way to communicate for Government as they control it. They don't rely on a company and can manage the servers.
  
  My mistake.
- From the post of the account linked here (in Dutch): it is going to be a place for official government communication, not for individual government employees (and I presume, by extension, public registration in general)
  
  My mistake.
- This is literally all instances... Nothing you do here should be considered private or be linked to your real information.
  
  Agreed, but we have to trust the instances we keep accounts on. Trust is subjective, but I certainly wouldn't trust a government ran instance for anything other than an outlet for information originating from the owning government.
  If I run a private instance or know the maintainer of another, then I can have greater confidence in the security/privacy implementations.
- This is likely exclusively for the government departments or employees, not personal use

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

I hope that other governments follow suit.

I tried to start a Mastodon account, but I got the error message "Validation failed: time zone not included in list"
- Soo... you're located on Mars?

That is pretty cool

https://social.overheid.nl/@beheerder/110684642686045200

lmao

nice approach :)

Can't find any sources on this. I'd be wary
- Tweakers.net, which is pretty much the biggest techsite in the Netherlands, has an article about it aswell. You can be sure this is very real.
  
  Im sorry but does tweaker have a different meaning in the Netherlands or is that name on purpose.
- Link in post
  
  Yeah there's a link to the account but no proof it is official

Sounds even more 1984 to me than Twitter or Meta as hoster.
- I think you misunderstood the purpose of this. This is not for citizens to join it's an instance for government officials and offices. This is very good practice to prove a account is the official account.
  But honestly I have more trust in my government to not exploit on me then I have in meta/Twitter.
  
  Possible. I'd rather call it sceptical.

259 comments