The Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server, State Secretary of Digitalisation @avhuffelen announced today! The server lives on the official domain of the Dutch government, at social.overheid.nl.
More Dutch government institutes have joined Mastodon today:
⛅The National Meteoreological Institute @knmi
🌊The National agency for Infrastructure and Watermanagement @rijkswaterstaat
🚗Traffic updates for the highways, also via Rijkswaterstaat @RWSverkeersinfo
@fediversereport@avhuffelen ¿se imaginan un gobierno de #PuertoRico progre, iluminado, que no bote el dinero en huelebicherias y que hiciera esto? Todas las agencias gubernamentales proveyendo información de una forma centralizada y organizada.
@fediversereport@avhuffelen
Love to see this! Sadly, if the US #NWS tried this, roughly half the legislature would defund all of #noaa and over half of the high court would rule it unconstitutional.
Knowing the difference from profit driven to value-driven social networks is so damn cool . Impressed by the Dutch government for it's ability to perceive the difference, between value and profit.
@fediversereport This is great news! Open architecture for social media networks is de facto better for growth and #economies in general than closed systems can even dream of.
It may take a little more investment up-front to get started, but the pay-off will come and it will be huge.
@fediversereport@avhuffelen
Love it:
“[…] the fire department send out an emergency text warning to people, urging them to check Twitter for the latest updates. However, this coincided with Twitter preventing people who do not have accounts from viewing tweets, resulting in people not being able to see emergency service updates. The House filed a motion in response, stating that emergency situations, the government should make sure that information is publicly accessible.
@Brendanjones@fediversereport@avhuffelen that's just the plain lack of understanding on how the internet works. "see my updates on twitter" really means "twitter decides what to show you, it might play nice and show you my update, but it doesn't have to"
@marcorobotics@fediversereport@avhuffelen I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. They decided that information needed to be publicly accessible for exactly the reason you say - government messages shouldn’t be reliant on private companies playing nice.
@Brendanjones@fediversereport@avhuffelen I think people are only now realizing that twitter may or may not publish your messages, but fundamentally they should have known that's the way it's always been. It's the same for most services these days, and it's so sad to see how centralized the internet has become over the years.
Previously Twitter did have Emergency Alerts program.
Official Emergency organisations could apply to have Push Notifications, apear at the top of timeline and be shown differently, for those subscribed, if time critical emergency information was being shared. Eg out of control wild fires impacting towns.
Not sure how something like that would work with this decentralized system and any time lags across the fediverse.
@SuperMoosie@Brendanjones@fediversereport@avhuffelen I have to admit I didn't know about twitter's emergency alert program. I would still object to that system being the "official" method of sending alerts, it should merely mirror messages already present on the public service's own website.
@marcorobotics@SuperMoosie@fediversereport@avhuffelen here in the Netherlands, emergency alerts are sent out to anyone within range of a Dutch phone tower - at least on iOS it’s a built in function https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202743 So that’s the official method. Any further alerts on social media would be nice to have’s. Definitely shouldn’t have to rely on Twitter for it, in any case!
@marcorobotics@SuperMoosie@fediversereport@avhuffelen it’s interesting to think about how emergency alerts could be done here 🤔 you can already turn on notifications for when an account you follow posts, so if governments were to make a dedicated ‘emergency alerts’ account then anyone could follow that account.
I’m not sure how you’d make notifications or posts temporarily sticky or pinned to the top of a feed. Might need new AP spec for that …
@Brendanjones@fediversereport@avhuffelen This was one of the first things I've been thinking when people said twitter outages could interfere with existing emergency notification systems.
Federated mastodon servers are exactly the solution to this problem.
@Yora@fediversereport@avhuffelen even unfederated servers are the answer! As long as I, as a citizen, am able to always access that server’s posts if I need to, because the government hosts the server itself. If I understand correctly I could still grab the RSS feed of an unfederated server.
@Brendanjones@fediversereport@avhuffelen But I don't think a lot of people would make a second account specifically for public notifications.
It's much more appealing if you access them with software and accounts you're already using anyway.
@Brendanjones
I think it would be a good idea for governments to ban members from participating in social media in an official capacity. I'm not sure how it would be worded, but it's been risky from the beginning for corporations to be involved in publishing state information. @Yora@fediversereport@avhuffelen
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