The EU itself also has a Mastodon instance with the funny, overly clear name of social.network.europa.eu
But only the institutions of EU, not for EU residents.
I like this idea because it becomes very easy to verify authenticity especially now that verification badges on X is just subscription badges without verification. You simply set up a subdomain of the form social.country.tld (much like the German parliament did) and you’ll know forename.surname@social.country.tld is an authentic representative for a political party or whatever. No money involved other than running the instance, which will be a tiny cost for something as niche as one offering a voice for the parliament alone.
So I hope this takes off even more around the world. It is certainly a more democratic way to do social than paying some dude in America that runs his personal garden to have badges.
Well I finally did get an invite to Bluesky, so I’m using that… Just need it to open for more people, because shit is barren right now. Let’s hope either that or Mastodon blow up soon. I’ve really been enjoying Bluesky, the layout is so similar to Twitter.
What is attractive for many organisations and agencies on Mastodon, is that they can better control their own message, and can be sure that on their sites there won’t be something embarrassing to them right next to their posts
Haha I think they might be talking of how Mastodon doesn’t insert ads or bought posts right next to your own posts, so a professional institution like a parliament no longer risks having erection pills or a crypto ad that fakes association with a celebrity next to a post by a political party leader.
The way Matstodon works makes it a very different animal. Just recently they started rolling out more robust search too, so it’s continuing to improve.
You can even follow lemmy with Mastodon if you choose too. Depending on your client, and what you follow, it might be noisy to do so though!
Another cool advantage of a organization or government hosting their own instance is that every user gets name@official-url.tld so no one can impersonate them. No blue check mark systems required.
But Mastodon also has a simple system to verify an account by linking a profile to a website too.
Anyway, I’m just doing a nerdy info-dump now. I’ll leave it at that.
Anyway, I’m just doing a nerdy info-dump now. I’ll leave it at that.
Well, thanks for taking the time to try and explain it. I’m trying to learn as much as I can. I’m between jobs right now and want to try to get into some sort of software development.
Well checking it up they don’t actually have their own instance. Instead they arranged an account on the social.bund.de instance, which is run by the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI) for purpose of offering official accounts to german governmental entities.
What makes it still “less likely something bad is right next to them” is exactly, that only government official and officials can get accounts on that instance and is for official use only. So thus it’s a sterile controlled instance.
I’m sure they could have also spun their own instance, but well bund.de service was already running one anyway so just hop on that band wagon.
I think this will become a more common thing. Governments run a national “official business” instance, where there is only official communications accounts of various government bodies and goverment officers (The official account of the office of the Presidency of the country, the official account of the Prime minister of the country and so on).
The reliability of third-party nitter instances has been hit or miss due to the churn, but the main nitter.net instance still works fine. They appear to be using automatically-obtained guest accounts.
A dozen today, 13 tomorrow, eventually more people will know about it and join. You don’t have to go that far back for governments having any social media presence at all being a very weird thing.
This - Twitter is currently not usable without an account. You can’t see any posts and there’s no way to ensure that your followers will see your posts. Therefore it’s really useless as a communication channel for government information.
Six: Baden-Würtemberg
So, 37.5% of all states. Still wondering why it takes so long for the other ones to move or at least open an account on mastodon.
There are also some accounts for state governments, but it seems only three so far:
In the case of the SH instance the government seems to be the only user, while on social.bund.de you’ll find a flurry of different stuff, both state and federal level, say the federal weather service, unsurprisingly quite popular. I’m actually quite surprised Bavaria of all states is using the federal instance.
Instance choice is going to be complicated with some SH institutions because on the one hand we’re just as much as a “state’s rights and sovereignty” state as Bavaria (pretty much the only thing we have in common short of agriculture), but OTOH share quite a few with Hamburg, say, statistics.
These things are never as easy as “just open an account” when it comes to states.
I’ve been on Mastodon for awhile now. It’s decent, but it’s desperately needs an algo despite what the long term people on there think, while simultaneously wondering why it keeps failing to catch on. Also the community on there is incredibly boring.
Of course it’s boring, on most instances you‘ll get nuked by some powertripping admin for posting something remotely interesting outside their mental safe zone, so everyone plays it safe.
Hey, I just started using Mastodon and my experience for now is a bit mixed. I must be doing something wrong.
I don’t follow people yet but only subjects (#). Thing is, my feed isn’t really interesting. I come across german, asian, spanish posts (I’m looking for french and english content) and the vast majority of them isn’t “retweeted” (boosted ?) or even “liked”. Most aren’t interesting to be quite honest and I don’t like browsing my feed. Would love to know what do I do wrong !
Hashtags are a thing but you need to find people to follow who are boosting others post.
The most important is to find groups about your interests. Groups are accounts to follow who will boost every post mentioning it. This will help you to find interesting account to follow.
Boosting is important has it’s how people discover new content.
But why would people on Mastodon for example use English instead of their first language? That’s the point. Mastodon works different from Lemmy. When I am simply writing a sort of online diary about my research project, local politics or whatever, why would it be in English?!
Find interesting people in those hashtags and follow them. Not everyone posts using hashtags everytime so you’re very likely missing on a lot of interesting content. Also, if your local feed (the one where you see posts from people on your own instance) is not of your interest you may want to migrate to another more specific or general, depending on your choice.
That’s just mastodon for you, since it has no algo. You’ll get gaslighted into being told this is good despite being continued to be bored. Unfortunately what you described is the Mastodon experience currently.
Hm, that’s too bad. Though it shows the incredible powers those algorithms have. Mastodon has been utterly bland for me but I’m not ready to give up yet.
I feel it is a bit of a reality check in that most people actually just post mundane stuff, while certain other sites purposely promote all the rage bait and controversial topics instead, which somewhat distorts your potential world view.
You got to follow a bunch of people before it starts to feel worthwhile, see if anybody you know from outside of Mastodon has a profile there, or open up different instances and check out people there.
If you want you can even follow people and Communities (though on Mastodon they’re called groups) from Lemmy and reply to them from Mastodon (it is a little bit clunky).
Though for best results you should try and follow people on Mastodon or similar federated microblogging platforms, since people who they follow also have a chance of showing up in your feed.
This is literally what I’m talking about. You say that and then wonder why Mastodon doesn’t catch on, yet every other successful social media does this. It’s already evident that people don’t want this by the huge numbers dropping off mastodon.
Sure, if you act like the mastodon users who are holier-than-thou preachy, yet are the harmful capitalists that create the problems they preach against. They’re toxic. Not to right wingers, but to other left wingers. If you’re new to these politics outside of America, I’m not right wing btw, I’m more left then they are which is why I’m not capitalist.
I think the value in Mastodon rn is getting away from the algo. I think the lack of one does limit its marketability though. I never really liked Twitter but I know a lot of people who do who hate mastodon because of how complicated it feels and the lack of content.
I never felt it was too complicated, though the people unfamiliar with decentralization definitely get confused by the process of on boarding. The lack of content is still the issue for a lot of reasons. Mastodon’s search is straight up broken. Also it doesn’t show federations of users you’re following, it can definitely extend it’s social graph a lot more. They intentionally nerf it for dumb reasons thinking it somehow marginalizes people, it makes no sense.
Lemmy does do this and is why it feels a lot more exciting on Lemmy. It’s also why I pretty much abandoned Mastodon since most of my time is on Lemmy at this point.
You have to build your own algorithm. I follow a lot of artists who have moved over. You can also search the handle of a lot of larger Twitter channels - there’s a bot that pulls content over from them in some cases.
Yup, I found some of those bots and they’re quite useful. I’ll try to find more. I’d also love to follow artists but I don’t know how to find out who moved on Mastodon. Guess I’ll type a bunch of names.
Unlike Twitter, hashtags don’t perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it’s federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don’t share your interests.
If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.
In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it’s more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that’s just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don’t have a basis for comparison. :-)
Is there no way to search hash tags across all instances at all? It seems like someone should figure that out. The ui has that connotation given how search works historically on other sites.
On a federated server system layout, that search would be tremendously computationally/network intensive as it would require somehow finding out all instances and communities within each instance and repolling the servers to get that info periodically to ensure the list is updated. A better approach would be an app (on your mobile or hosted somewhere) that would maintain a list of servers and would do that query outside of the servers that handle conversations.
Although search on a federated system seems to be almost impossible to implement at this point, I think it is a crucial step in taking back the web.
What I mean with this is: most of the people that are on the Fediverse right now seem to look very fondly on the World Wide Web as it was a decade ago. Before Social Media became gated communities, support for RSS was dropped everywhere, corporations found out that the web could be used for advertisements and tracking mechanisms were implemented.
Reddit has - until this summer - been a corner of the web where some of us still found valuable information and held discussions with real people. Back in the good old days we had homepages and blogs that we subscribed to and searched through. On Reddit we had our subreddits.
When I was looking for a discussion on a niche topic (or even honest product experience) I used my search term site:reddit.com on Google all the time. This basically meant: I’m only concerned for the part of the World Wide Web that is reddit.com and not deluted by corporate / seo / influencer bullshit.
With the Fediverse hopefully taking Reddit’s place, how do we go on from here? How do we narrow down our search scope to the useful part of the web nowadays?
Is this true? I mostly subscribe to hashtags but definitely see a lot of content from outside my instance based on the hashtag alone. Is it something that instance admins can make happen with certain other instances or something?
I thought the whole point of the fediverse thing was data could be shared between instances like it works on Lemmy where you see things from all over the fediverse in your feed. I’m super new to this whole thing though so I don’t really know.
To clarify, it is not that you won’t see content from other instances, it is that your instance only stores content from another instance when someone on your instance has subscribed to it. So if you decided to subscribe to a bunch of things on other instances with hashtags matching your interests, then you and other people would start to see this content showing up when searching for the hashtag on your instance.
I’m sorry you haven’t had a great experience. Mastodon has been my go-to for archaeology news since leaving Reddit and it tends to have a lot less bullshit and pseudoscience right now, which I just love.
That’s nice ! I’m sure I need to get used to it a bit more, that’s why I didn’t give up yet. It’s been less than a week for mo it’d be a bit foolish to stop trying now.
It takes time. Twitter (or whatever it wants to be called) has an algorithm expressly aimed at keeping you “engaged”, whereas Mastodon is just a stream of toots which you see based on the time you decide to visit. Should you stick with it, eventually two things will happen:
You will find accounts and topic to follow which will fill your timeline with content that is relevant and interesting to you, and, perhaps more importantly
Your mind will give up the habit of being hooked on a social media stream (apologies if I’m implying something that isn’t true for you - it certainly was for me).
In the end, maybe you decide it’s not for you, but I’ve been using it for years (since 2017), and over time it’s completely replaced Twitter for me. I’m keeping three accounts for different interests (and one on Pixelfed), logged into all of them using Fedilab. I actually deleted my Twitter account the day the Tucker/Tate interview hit the light of day, but I stopped actively visiting it years earlier. My mental state improved a lot over time since I moved on.
I think the lack of an algorithm to keep you engaged is what makes it better than Xwitter, and the main reason why I have a mastodon account, but I never had (nor ever will have) an account on Txitter.
my masto experience so far (starting fall last year):
1st instance: everything goes well, got a small, but nice following. at some point i find out - by accident - that i'm shadowbanned. contact support, they told me that someone complained about something and to appease them, they muted my posts from the instances public timeline ("account was not suspended because no rules were broken") without even telling me. they refuse to this day to tell my what i posted to trigger this. deleted my account after this.
2nd instance: after one (!) day a zerg army of right wing weirdos started to spam my mentions, calling me a "fed" and other well known slurs because i posted something they didn't agree with. deleted my account after this.
meanwhile i still have my 700 followers on twitter and for some reason no one shadowbanned me or tried to bully me away. guess i should just open my own instance :^)
This has likely happened because the german government created the social.bund.de instance earlier this year, paving the way for various government things in germany to simply request an account and be set up.
This is great to see. Honestly I think software that governments invest into should be exclusively open source. It is paid for by the public’s money after all, so it should be offered back to the public.
This has likely happened because the german government created the social.bund.de instance earlier this year
The instance is almost 3.5 years old btw, which you can easily see from the instance admin account @itteam. It just wasn’t used by many government departments at the time, mostly the data protection agency and the BSI. The @ltrlp account itself is pretty old too. It dates back to before the whole Twitter debacle. I guess that’s also part of the reason why they decided to go full Mastodon, since they already have a lot of experiences with it.
This is an amazing sign. Governments joining a particular social media is an underrated sign of platform success. People want to reach and hear from their government officials. I don’t think it will be long before this will no longer be big news
The German state already has its own instance (social.bund.de). Our federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information already recommended our chancellor to switch to Mastodon, but he declines every time and his office insists on putting screenshots of his tweets on their website.
The Dutch government also launched their own mastodon instance recently at social.overheid.nl. Several government departments have already joined. I hope politicians will also make the move, although I do not know if this specific instance allows for accounts other than those of government departments.
When you make public announcements as a politician or political party, it should be done via a channel that can be accessed without registration!
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