This is certainly a growing trend which was first started amongst end-users themselves, and slowly we've seen a few news media outlets also following suite. So far, only a very few government agencies have actually followed. Coming to mind are also The Netherlands. What is attractive for many organisations and agencies on Mastodon, is that...
What?
They have their own instance. That’s their own website.
Sure, you can subscribe to them. But that’s different from being the the algorithmic soup that is Twitter.
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).
Thanks for the extra details 👍.
I look forward to there being lots of unique instances for different applications over time.
Thanks. I guess I need to go read about it some. I don’t understand how that works.
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.tldso 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.
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.
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.