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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

> EU Voice is open for registrations only to EU institutions, body and agencies.

Disappointing. Better then nothing, but why not provide a platform for everyone, or at least every EU citizen?

It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.

Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.

We have to unlearn that "everything centralized is good and the only way to go"

> It is better to have an official instance just like you have official websites. It means that accounts on this instance are official, that you can take their words as official statement.

The EU could verify official accounts on their instance.

> Having one big instance for every EU citizen is just political centralisation and is not a lot better than the economical one done by Twitter.

It would be an alternative. People would of course remain free to choose other instances.

> The EU could verify official accounts on their instance.

I don't think the Fediverse has any concept of "verification" as such. Hence "use your own domain to prove your identity".

It's federation. You also wouldn't expect every citizen to get an @europarl.europa.eu e-mail-adress. The platform is decentralised by design, so just by joining, the EU is contributing to "providing a platform" imho.

I don't see why the EU shouldn't give every citizen an @europa.eu email address.

I agree it would be neat to give emails to EU citizens and a "fediverse" account would be a cool addition to that, but that's a completely different situation to the launch discussed here. A government-only ActivityPub server is part of essential G2C communication, not just another nice-to-have service the EU provides.

For the same reason not every US citizen is entitled to a .gov address?

.gov is intended to signify offical US government websites. .eu domains can be registered by anyone.

.europa.eu is the closest equivalent to .gov

It's the base url used by all EU institutions

europa.eu is a domain, .eu is the TLD. There is no TLD equivalent of .gov for Europe.

European agencies use bunch of different domains, not all of them are a subdomain under europa.eu, although many of them are under that one.

You can see some examples of organizations/agencies that are not here: https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/ins...

> There is no TLD equivalent of .gov for Europe

Which is why I said:

> is the closest equivalent

Also it's a distinction without a difference in the context of the discussion, a tld is just another kind of domain. In the same way .gov subdomains are reserved for US government and signify to the users that the content of the page has official value subdomains of .europa.eu are reserved for EU institutions and agencies

The same way it'd not be smart for the US government to give out john.smith@gov email addresses it'd not be particularly clever for the EU to give out francois.martin@europa.eu

And no, all official agencies and institutions use .europa.eu subdomains, the only exception in that page seem to be other bodies such as research groups which are not official branches of the EU

Then make a citizen.eu site or something like that and hand out addresses!

For information, this idea was actually talked about during a h2020 meeting, but discarded (probably because free market stuff)

Because that is an offical EU domain. Email coming from that domain is official EU correspondance. If the EU wanted to run a mail system available to all EU citizens, it would make more sense to register "civitas.eu" or some similar domain and provide it there.

I've often hoped the US would do this as well. Postal addresses are dependent on having a physical address—home, apartment, etc. Would love if people could habe a digital address that were not dependent on paying rent but citizenship.

How would you resolve the local name part? Do I get to claim xylakant@mail.europa.eu or is there a dispute process? hans.mueller@mail.europa.eu is going to be contentious.

I mean, I think there'd be considerable risk to that. You'd in effect be giving the government direct access to a terrifying amount of personal information.

Because there is no reason to do so? Providing e-mail address is service successfully provided by private sector, no need to use public money to destroy competition in private sector and centralise a service to one provider.

Most of EU engagement in digital services is to encourage market sector, not replace it with a public monopoly (see e.g. eIDAS).

If you limit it only to government officials/orgs, moderation isn’t an issue. Plenty of good, trustworthy mastodon instances exist.

Cost of moderation would be significantly higher.

I've been wondering about the handling of PR / legal / moderation issues on The Fediverse. Surely if it becomes popular, those burdens will fall on the shoulders of well-intentioned volunteers who just wanted to run a server, who will generally be ill-equipped to deal with them? I guess it could be OK if you're running a small invite-only server for people you know, but not sure how it's going to work for larger instances. Which, looking at the history of email, are probably where most people will want to be.

Assuming the fediverse becomes popular enough there will no doubt be large websites that finance themselves with ads/subscriptions.

After all git is a decentralized system as well and big silos like GitHub exist.

Moderation choices themselves would also have geopolitical readings from trading partners. It would be quite touchy.

I'd like that as well. Possibly scaling (=funding) issues?

It's a matter of will of course. The EU talks a lot about digital sovereignty and right now, with a lot of people looking for alternatives to twitter, they have an incredible chance to advance that.

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