The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server, at social.overheid.nl. The server came online over the weekend, and today the Alexandra van Huffelen, State Secretary of Digitalisation, announced that the server has officially been taken into use. The server is hosted on the domain overheid.nl, the official domain of the Dutch government.
Funny thing is that I'm not sure if governments should run official Mastodon servers where all political parties blend into one. I'm from Finland, and we currently have a mild problem called "dipshit party having actual political reach". Including several members of parliament who have tweeted Not So Savoury Things which would be a banworthy offence in pre-Musk Twitter (if anyone at the staff comprehended Finnish language, that is). So maybe the task of running Mastodon servers for candidates and actual serving members of political machinery should fall to the political parties. If an entite dipshit party gets defederated, maybe that's a signal they should consider.
I don’t think this server will be used by individuals or the political parties. This will be used by the institutions and departments of the government to broadcast information
Finally! This is the first instance I’ve seen of any government participation. I hope Canada jumps on board soon, even if in a limited capacity. It makes so much more sense for a public agency to use a public platform, particularly when it can have domain over its own instance.
Governments use Twitter, they might as well use Mstdn. At the end of the day, you can just block the account if you don’t want anything to do with government stuff, or you might decide to join an anti-goverment server instead that just defeds from gov servers.
Either way. This would be a win-win for the Fediverse. Allows new people to hear about it and validates Mastadon as an alternative to Twitter and Threads.
Its a little different though, because they host their own server and can verify updates before pushing them onto their own hardware. So they arent dependent on foreign volunteers in the same way that they were dependent on foreign servers when using twitter.
100% agree its the open source and decentralized nature that matters more than whos employed where :)
Good or bad government needs a channel to communicate with its people. Considering twitter was blocking tweets for people without accounts, this is a great step.
PR and communication purposes. You shouldn’t be afraid of what official government accounts do; you should be afraid of what psi-ops paid by government officials do - and that can be on any account and system, be it facebook, twitter, reddit, or whatever.
Consider also that all government entities require some sort of infrastructure to operate, and this covers government subsidies, scholarships, complaints about a sinkhole appearing under your house, Tsunami alerts, or getting information about your parking tickets.
If those services reside on their own servers, it’s government-owned and paid by your taxes. If they reside on Elon Musk’s private servers, reside in a country you don’t live in, is spying for governments you don’t even belong to, what the hell is your government doing there?
Even if it’s PR, even if it’s propaganda, there is nothing inherently wrong about using open source software residing on tax-funded facilities. That’s the way it should be.
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