Would you support a European Citizens Initiative to force our politicians to drop Twitter and create their own Mastodon instances?

I think no government should depend on any commercial platform to communicate with its citizens. As low tech as possible and workable would be best I suppose, so maybe just a website? Mastodon could work too I guess.

RSS feed maybe
- But who has an RSS reader (app) these days? Everyone has a web browser. Still an RSS feed would be a lot better than anything controlled by a commercial party, X, Facebook, whatever…

Honestly it just seems nutty to me that every sovereign government isn't running its own mastodon instance for PR stuff.

They can continue posting to xitter if they really want.

Everything mission critical to the governent should be open source and secure in my opinion. Of course using mastodon would be nice but what is extremely important is to start using linux insead of microsoft and similar examples because they pose a genuine risk.

As opposed to Linux, which poses a penguin risk.

Puns aside, I completely agree with you, but that one might be either the best or the worst thing to happen to OSS. Best case scenario the govt. ensures critical technology is funded and maintained, is invested in and essentially brings a sustainable model for maintainers. Worst case, open source is regulated out of existence as we know it. There was a piece of EU legislation that thankfully didn't pass, which would've resulted in just that. Here's a reference, sorry I don't have the time right now for a better one.
just talked with a coworker about that. europe is heavily relying on microsoft products and investing a lot of money into them. we are certain, that all that money can easily pay for an expert team to develop and maintain a eu-gov linux distro.

i know that certain military branches maintain a hardened version of different linux distros for critical systems. why not take this to the next level and have an expert team maintaining your OS?

Here are my previous thoughts.

Thanks for sharing

It should've been done already!

Tbh, what I've understood EU has been trying to help create it for years. It just never got wings to fly. Maybe now there's enough lift.

I would love for the "official/non personal" accouts to be on Mastodon. I feel strongly they should do whatever they like in their time off, but for the love of the fediverse please use Mastodon for official communication. A lot of my country's politicians (the Netherlands) are using Twitter/X to communicate and I hate it. (They even argue on there.. I'm not missing that)

Its nuts that anything is using this. Especially things that have their own infrastructure to begin with like news agencies.

Definitely.

I will support it yes.

A European Citizen Initiative requires a massive investment to come through (quotas of signature per country, amount of signatures, quantity of personal data signatories have to give away, etc.) while at the same time it cannot force the EU to do anything. the Commission can just decide to file it vertically (in the trash can) and they often do.

So speak about a glorified, expansive petition... and you may find modes of action that are way way more efficient.

“Support” is vague. Your link is unreachable to Tor users so I can’t see what it’s about.

I boycott Twitter wholly. Will not set foot there. In fact, it’s mutual. Twitter kicked me off their platform when I refused to share a mobile phone number. Thus I inherently support dropping TWTR by not consuming it.

It’s embarassing and very disturbing that the public sector (especially in Europe) uses shitty corporate exclusive walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook. When a politician uses Twitter or Facebook exclusively, they should be sued for free speech infringement. The #1 purpose of free speech is to express yourself to policy makers. When they use an exclusive gatekeeper to block some people from reaching them, it’s an assault on free speech.

Whether they do Mastodon or not does not matter so much. Would be useful if they did, but the real focus should be on just getting them off exclusive tech. They can work out for themselves that Mastodon is useful and inclusive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens'_Initiative
- Here's a working link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Citizens'_Initiative
I'd agree with compelling politicians to change platform only in the case you outline above, where said politician (assuming they are democratically elected) is unreachable through other means of communication. Else I think everyone is free to make their own decision as to what platform/soapbox they want to use, just as much as I have the right to not use that platform.
- People don’t have a right to use Twitter -- b/c it’s a private company that excludes people (e.g. people without mobile phones). That’s the first problem.
  
  I heard a rumor that (like Facebook) Twitter was closing read access so only members could /read/ posts. Did that ever happen? Maybe not, because I was just able to reach a twitter timeline without having Twitter creds as a test. If that exclusivity plays out, then politicians will be writing messages that a segment of people are excluded from viewing. It would not be enough that they can be reached by other means. Politicians would also have to copy all of their messages to an accessible space somewhere.
  
  It’s also insufficient that I can reach them outside twitter only by non-microblogging means. E.g. by letter. A letter is a private signal not seen by others. Microblogging is an open letter mechanism. It’s important to deliver your msg to a polician in a way that the msg has an audience. Take away the audience and you take away the power of the signal.

I clicked the link to support the initiative but I landed on the home page. Am I missing something?

I think the idea of the post is to ask if we would support it, in case it existed.
- Yes exactly

I believe each country should host their instance of Mastodon free of censorship (under legal limits, of course). These instances should give accounts to members of political parties. These instances would be federated with as many other instances as possible.

What would be possible flaws of this system?

How does moderation work in that case? It would have to have comments disabled if it's government ran or they risk censoring (or not censoring) people. Either that or a non-government entity could run an eu instance and only give accounts to officials from various countries/groups/entities.

Would it be technically infeasible for their servers to only handle their own stuff, but where responses to it could still be made externally, viewable depending on what you federate with?
- I guess if they just don't federate or only federating with other official instances. If people want to discuss it, then they can just link to it. Can you subscribe to non-fed instances?

@Blaze @buyeuropean I would

How about they just use IRC and also have email addresses they actually read

I actually not want our politicians to personally read all emails I send to them. There's a ton of emails to read and I would prefer the politicians doing something else than just reading endless emails.

They've got aides for that, and the aides will inform the politician about the relevant content in the emails. And will of course forward individual emails to the politician if they so wish. The important thing is that the emails get read by the politician's office.
- Solution, another level of politician, perhaps per street?

I thought we were going to use Bluesky...

Why not on Bluesky? I used Mastodon about 8 or so years ago and it was confusing.

Bluesky is just kicking the problem down the road for a few years.
Because Bluesky is just another commercial centralised platform.
Not the OP, but mastodon is open source and not corporately controlled. That seems pretty important when whoever controls the platform can make decisions about what content is surfaced to a user. If I'm the government or a politician I want to make sure I have a direct line to my constituents.

I use both these days, I don't think the user interface is particularly confusing for mastodon, but I think what bluesky has over it is you don't have to choose a server, and the types of users and stuff they're posting on bluesky has a certain appeal. (For example all the funny accounts I used to follow on twitter went to bluesky)
- I think what bluesky has over it is you don't have to choose a server
  
  That's part of it. But even getting over that, if I make a Mastadon account on a themed instance I don't even know how to find people more diverse types of people to follow. At least in Bluesky they're all in one place. And most importantly to me you can share custom feeds on Bluesky.