The swiss governments will do it like always: Five years too late, try to create and establish an own IT system, probably a twitter clone, somehow give the project to "Die Post" or an even worse IT firm, which then gets cancelled because of security concerns a few months afterwards, loosing millions.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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That really sounds like something the swiss government would do.
I uncomfortably giggled way to hard at this.
It would like to see some federal instances where all cantons, communities and police would post their updates.
Edit: Typos
This could be the answer. To avoid problems with moderation and freedom of speech, the instance could be for governmental bodies only and not the public. The EU did that for their official bodies.
Excatly, publish information and control themselves, what should be posted.
With bigger apps like Threads opening the way to connect to other social medias through ActivityPub, this could eventuall come true some day.
This should be two different questions. Since I know little about the Swiss government just answering generally:
Should ditch Twitter?
Unambiguously, objectively yes. Twitter’s reputation as a “public square” is gone, and it cannot now be relied upon to disseminate information. If I’ve already used my limited API calls a day scrolling through my feed for like an hour, I now can’t see official government informational postings? Not to mention the absurdly common outages now, the ridiculous content policies, the fake blue check system, and all the other stupidity that Musk has shoved into the system.
Really we shouldn’t ever have been using any privately held system for this (because such mishandling of the service was always a possibility), but Elon’s change have made it objectively unworkable for that purpose even on its best day.
Should ditch it for Mastadon/etc?
This is a harder question to answer easily, but I still think yes. The argument against it is that a relatively tiny fraction of people use Mastadon still, and public entities do need to be where the public can see it. The counter argument for that is that people who don’t use Mastadon now can still click a link and open a website to view a Mastadon feed, and no one needs any more knowledge about what Mastadon is to view that feed. And then people who DO know Mastadon can follow those accounts, toot replies, etc.
Fully agree. The government's communication being subject to a private entity was never a good scenario anyway. The Fediverse might provide them a technical solution, but more people need to use it for that to be viable and effective.
BTW it's Mastodon, not Mastadon ;)
Great write up, i agree.
They need to be, where the public can see them. As i mentioned in an other comment. With Metas Threads opening up to other social medias through ActivityPub, this could change the game for federal owned instances some day.
I'm absolutely in favour of cantons and the federal government itself creating their own mastodon servers to make announcements from. Regular people could interact with them, but only official entities would have user accounts there. I could imagine accounts like @Winterthur and @Wetzikon, as well as @BAG (plus @OFSP and @UFSP for French and Italian) and @BAFU etc.
This, would love to see something like this.
A major benefit would be that the mere fact that the home instances of those accounts are government owned would be better verification than something like Twitter or Threads could ever offer.
Is that the real BAG mastodon account or a fake? Well, does it have admin.ch or ch.ch as its home domain (or something like mstdn.admin.ch, point is the base domain is government owned)? If not, it's a fake.
Swiss government isn't going to ditch twitter anytime soon. Nothing moves this quickly in the Swiss government. But it would be an excellent time to create their own instance and give it a try.
Once twitter truly goes to shits they can simply switch their primary focus.
The government has resources to setup an instance and set some good set of rules around them. Didn't they have something similar like this in the past? I have some random flashbacks about a project with swisscom.
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