@anildash Agree, but I wish they'd run their own instance. Right now I have to trust that potus@threads.net's blue checkmark means something...and we've seen a history of blue checkmarks becoming less credible over time (thanks, Elon).
I think we can trust it because there are new articles confirming it. But, that's a lot of work. Why not have and official us.gov instance. How fancy would that be?
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I am hopeful that all governments will do so eventually. I imagine there is a political and legal thicket they have to navigate regarding moderation and federation and there would have to be funding set aside for it and security procedures created.
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I agree I think they have the technical ability. I think the political aspect is much harder. Who decides which servers to defederate with and which users and posts to block? Right now they can point at Meta or Twitter or whomever and say that the decision is out of their hands. On a government run server they have to make those choices and there are no easy answers.
I think for something like government it's more like a broadcasting rss feed than a place where information is collected and curated. They could share posts that they support, and let anyone read and serve their posts.
I'm interested to see if they ever share anything at all. And more important if they EVER share anything not on threads. I'll give them three months to pass this test.
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I like that idea. Maybe they can disable comments? I remember reading that some Mastodon or Fediverse server has support for that. I think Pixelfed can do it.
Disabling comments is more of a server specific or app based thing. There isn't any one official set of comments that corresponds to any post on the fediverse. I think this is something that is hard to understand coming from walled garden single server social media.
Yes there could be a terrible server where terrible people put terrible comments next to your post. But... we don't see those servers. Who cares?
@futurebird@franktaber@danciruli@anildash I think we should - at least in the future! More advanced protocols could do this, with varying assurances. It might take a few years - we‘ll see.
@anildash Still, I would prefer it would be something like potus@fediverse.gov or potus@social.whitehouse.gov` instead. To further decouple it from corporate infrastructure.
You think threads.net is the open web? FFS the president can and does have press releases typed up and posted to a government web server that anyone can read and link to. That's posting to the open web.
No, I don't, and I don't regard walled gardens as any kind of open web. Do you?
The president's threads posts being copied to the fediverse is just effectively an RSS feed. You want a real milestone for the fediverse? How about the white house sets up their own mastodon instance, accounts available only to white house staff, like the BBC did.
@anildash it certainly is a milestone for the open web. But it was that for Twitter too, and never became much more than another press release conduit. I hope we can find novel ways to expand the informational value of such government channels here. Maybe with parallel channels?
@anildash I don’t want to interact with threads. I don’t do Zuckerberg. So I see this as a failure of the Whitehouse: they should be running their own instance in ‘proper’ Mastodon, not weaseling ing via a commercial back door.
And I hope this is the start of many more such accounts to come as welll as organizations considering their own official instances not just via Threads (so they can have true two way discourse) and more of a range of accounts - but if just every official federal (and hopefully state and local) government official accounts use threads to join the larger fediverse that’s a win)
@stevenray@anildash@whitehouse@tchambers I haven’t tested it but my understanding is that Threads users see some aggregated stats about Fediverse activity but I don’t think can see specific replies or boosts (they can see how many different servers interacted with a post but I don’t think they can see the replies.
However I hope this changes (and that threads users can follow fediverse accounts etc) but I have no unique knowledge if/when that will happen.
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