Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
social.overheid.nl
social.overheid.nl
With ActivityPub and Mastodon our government could run a server for all our elected officials and then it would be our country that governed what they could and could not post on there. Now, I’m not a political radical, but I do think it’s sort of silly that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can say on a social media. This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them, but the concept is just anti-democratic.
The same could sort of be said about our journalists. If we had a press corps server instance, then someone posting that Tibet is a country or whatever “radical” thing you can get banned for, wouldn’t become a conflict of interest. Because they’d be allowed to write that, and our press corp genuinely couldn’t give two shits what China has to say about it.
That's why 99% don't care or will ever care about mastadon. Just like all other EU funded efforts go nowhere.
Social medias main features are - broadcast, Following others broadcasts, discovering what's trending. To the general public these are already solved problems on existing platforms.
The reason they jump from blog posts to twitter, or Facebook to insta or from insta to tiktok is there is a new feature available.
Mastadon does nothing new that the 99% think they need. In fact the main search results and discovery is a stream of total shit compared to other platforms.
- Rapid pace of development.
- Focus on users instead of ads or investors.
- You can become a dictator of your own instance, but no one gets to be dictator of the Fediverse.
- Bad instances will get shunned by the rest.
Of course, their biggest weakness if funding. So far donations can keep up with the small userbase, but the userbase will keep growing. Some popular Lemmy instances are growing at almost 100 GB per day already.
I remember when we talked about Reddit the same way. We’ll see if it lasts. I say this as someone who uses Kbin in particular a lot. I like it now but we’ve been down this road so many times. It’s hard not be skeptical.
They also need to make the relationship between these different apps and how it all works easier to digest. And some quality 3PA’s to fill in the gaps. I think Sync has plans to point at Lemmy so here’s hoping we see that soon!
You mean third-party apps? The passion with which developers have been working on Fediverse apps lately is humbling. On iOS, the ugly child of open source apps, just for Lemmy there's Memmy, and in TestFlight, Mlem, Thunder, and LiftOff!. These last are still beta/alpha, but Memmy is mature enough to compare with the former third-party Reddit clients.
The official Mastodon app recently got a much needed upgrade, and there are other good clients like MetaText, Ivory, and many more. If anything, there are too many choices now, the dust needs to settle.
It's refreshing to see a fundamental questioning of the status quo (corporate lordship), and a disrupting and viable technology (Fediverse) making strides in the right direction.
I might be biased because I remember a diverse Internet from before the corporate takeovers, and it seems like the Fediverse is attracting older adults who got to experience some of that diversity too: https://mastodon.art/@jsstaedtler/110668308409683502
Appreciate the app suggestions!
This features decreased for those platforms recently - since they are becoming walled gardens.
That is why for example Slovak railway company switched from Twitter to Mastodon this month. More people are on Twitter, but that does not matter for some forms of broadcasting, when anyone can view content on Mastodon.
Meta is owned by public investors (plenty of whom are in the EU), nobody has a majority stake.
Those sort of arrangements should be illegal imo
Really, if anything, they've helped a lot of folks sustaining their contributions.
- Mastodon: https://nlnet.nl/project/Mastodon/
- Lemmy: https://nlnet.nl/project/Lemmy/
- Pixelfed: https://nlnet.nl/project/Pixelfed/
- Misskey: https://nlnet.nl/project/Misskey/
- Bonfire: https://nlnet.nl/project/Bonfire/
And quite a few more. Honestly, I'm not sure how much of the ActivityPub ecosystem would exist without this funding.
Which may also explain the additional friction - sounds like you encountered a bug, or else the instance was just temporarily having issues. If the problem persists I would suggest filing an issue (assuming you are using an open source app).
I do this and this and this and use this and this end of transcript
https://social.bund.de multiple governmental departments
https://gruene.social and https://spd.social two parties currently in government
Sovereign nations and corporations are entirely different types of entity with virtually no overlap in real power, so you’re just muddying the waters to even imply otherwise. Even historically powerful corporations like the British East India Company found the basis for their authority in a nation which eventually revoked their authority, assumed its debts and obligations, and took possession of their armed forces, equipment, claimed lands and authority and disestablished the corporation.
I imagine is because they think their message will reach more people on Twitter/Facebook/Tiktok than on Mastodon.
The fix for this would be for the EU to mandate that Twitter and Facebook federate using ActivityPub, in such a way that following a Mastodon (etc) account gives that account as much reach as an account directly on Twitter/Facebook would have.
As for TikTok, since it's a massive national security risk it should just be blocked.
> I do think it’s sort of silly that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can say on a social media
This is only possible because your elected officials don't have the balls to tell Meta to do the right thing.
Actually that kinda IS democratic. The government can't just do whatever the hell it wants. that would be undemocratic.
The fact an external for-profit company in another country can limit what your politicians says however is a bit weird. But seeing as, generally, they won't have vested interest in Dutch affairs, maybe they're actually better than an internal entitity that may have a vested interest?
Calling it "undemocratic" seems like the more limited view imo?
So, despite Mastodon being a federated system it makes a lot more sense to use a dedicated instance for official purposes like this to me. I imagine they don't federate with anything anyway and don't even allow account creation.
Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.
Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.
Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.
They can however control a Mastodon instance, and starting one is a off-the-shelf operation now.
Another poster described it as "problems of governments relying on the whims of tech players in getting these messages out" which is exactly right. Those other platforms might have decided today not to show you the emergency warning unless you have an account and are logged in and have watched some ads first.
It is - for good reason - conventional wisdom that in order to get a message out thoroughly, you have "outposts" on _all_ the media that you don't own (including Facebook and twitter) and push content to there, but the "home base" is not on some platform where it can be locked, rate-limited or taken from you at the whim of some other company in some other country.
I think the more pressing thing is that they want to get anyone affected by Twitter, and Mastodon is a similar type of service. I’m sure they’re evaluating Threads as we speak.
Governments have whole departments dedicated to getting the word out about things because people aren't all in one place. This is not a big additional effort but it is different in two essential way: They control it, and it has APIs anyone can connect to, including to bridge elsewhere.
Really you don't need Twitter to stay informed- very few people actually follow government tweets and most of them are journalists.
Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody
I can agree with that.
Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n...
Meta rules the top 4 spots.
Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.
I think that's a misunderstanding or two. An Instagram/Threads account is one potential way "to follow the Dutch government" - actually this is hypothetical, as the threads/mastodon interop is also hypothetical at present, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36669480 .
An account on any public mastodon server is a second way to follow the Dutch government, and should work today much better than the first way. it doesn't need to be "on threads".
GETing the correct rss feed url on their mastodon server is a third way. You don't even need a mastodon account or any other account, but you have to "pull" the content, it's not pushed to your feed.
Finding out which other social media they broadcast to and following them there is possibly a fourth way.
The social media department of any large org would have active accounts on all of the social media in order to get a message out. That's how it is already, not sure what your objection to mastodon, where they own the instance, is.
A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?
Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.
Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"
“You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.”
A conventional web-site is good for distributing static information whereas a social media site is good for broadcasting notifications about CHANGES to that (more static) information.
Or rely on each website to format the messages in consistently good UX, typography, etc.
Or lose the ability to discover those updates through social network concepts like hashtags
Or have to employ their own RSS tools and subscriptions to approximate the aggregation already baked into mastodon et al
Or remove the ability to see conversations between government entities natively supported by @ mentions.
But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.
The "worst case" scenario is that people on this instance can follow someone undesirable and so that they end up with undesirable content in the local feed. But that's pretty much down to ensuring users act how they otherwise would on any social media, with the expectation it will be seen by the public.
I'm a bit surprised that they allow public access to the federated view of the server [1], because that does mean it potentially could get embarrassing w/respect to people who don't get that the gov. doesn't choose what ends up there, so I'd bet that eventually ends up locked down.
I'm not clear on what you mean by "forced to choose which side to take."
You (or anyone else) don't have to have an account on that instance. In fact IIUC, the site linked in the submission only has accounts for the Dutch government and elected officials of that government.
Folks other than that can follow individual accounts on the Dutch government instance, but aren't subject to any moderation decisions made by the site. Only those with accounts on that instance would be affected by blocks/bans of specific users or instances.
And even if the Dutch government instance wants to block other instances from their users, there's nothing stopping Dutch government officials (and/or agencies) from creating accounts on other instances.
As such, please explain what you mean by "choosing a side." I'd expect that this site is on the side of The Netherlands, its government and citizens. Isn't that the way it should be for a site like this?
As such, please explain what you mean.
Edit: Clarified prose. Fixed typo.
They can (and probably should) only show their federated feed to users of their instance, and they can silence other instances to prevent posts from making it into their federated feed even if someone follows accounts there, but defederation would likely be an extreme last resort for a government server.
In my mind, the worst case scenario is what we have for e-mail: 99% of Mastodon traffic might become spam. Maybe it's easier to control because Mastodon is a subscription model rather than a targeting model (the recipient is in control of what to receive, not the sender), but you only need one user on an instance to subscribe to a spam instance, and the local feed will be inundated. And that's manageable as long as that happens once or twice a day, but the same incentives that almost destroyed e-mail are still there for Mastodon.
i've come to disagree with this now that community notes have come into play, it makes twitter the best place for them to communicate if they're trying to show their honesty and sincerity
This is such a big problem where entities - and not only governments, but also other corporaate entities, and private citizens - rely far too much on the for-profit tech platforms.
The government doesn't have a website where it can host a page and create a link? That's just lazy.
I doubt the assertion that even a simple majority of people are "trained to go to Twitter" for urgent alerts, or that even if true, this would justify the government using them as the default platform to link to in their own government created alert messages.
Whether everyone must have one is an entirely different debate.
No thank you. This sort of thing will eventually become compelled and made into a series of regulations in the name of "safety", etc.
> lurk in the shadows of the Internet via anonymity and good opsec.
This is a feature, not a bug. Anonymitity is extremely important for many people.
Negating this won't keep you anonymous, we're already being tracked at every possible avenue with profiles created on us the second we open a website or app. We can either tackle this head on by taking ID seriously online on our terms (necessary E2EE, full ID can never be accessed, it's not stored in a central database, etc), or we can let most corporations continue to trade our profiles around for funsies while acting like our pseudonyms will protect us.
But it should also be an option to engage in platforms where anonymous spammers, trolls, and criminals are not feasible, where reputation matters and some level of social integrity can be restored. And ideally without a secretive corporation exploiting your attention and data for their profits.
I promise you that this latter group (youths, "normies") is vastly larger than the group of people who actually need anonymity.
I just don't think that's true. Many people have opinions that will lead them to being attacked and cancelled, etc. There are groups of people ready to isolate and pounce on whoever they can so as to compel others to shut-up.
I get what you're saying but I don't agree that government has a place in regulating speech. People are free to join or leave platforms as they see fit.
The EU busybodies are not your friends.
How would you access a bank account anonymously?
How would you file your taxes anonymously?
Get an education? Acquire (legal) drugs? Buy a house? Travel abroad (and back again)?
Most countries have a way to provide identity to provide the above services. Passports are an internationally federated system, but there is no equivalent for digital signatures.
This is a problem when you want to study or work abroad, or receive pension from abroad, or any of a dozen other real world situations that regularly causes headaches for normal people.
suspended from twitter? can't create another account cause you only have one id!
want to share something anonymously to avoid getting fired or investigated by feds? tough, you're required to sign in with your MyID to keep everyone safe!
the only way to prevent this is to not build it and vote out anyone who tries to create it.
government ruins and abuses everything it touches, we have a consistent pattern of behavior to go off here
we should actually be moving in the opposite direction.
i shouldn't have to prove i'm anyone basically ever, except for taxes and census.
not for planes or trains or buying liquor.
driving can be licensed but should be an "anonymous license", like "i'm driver #9238" not "i'm fred the licensed driver".
and those numbers ("driver number", ssn) should be barred from use as identification for any other purpose with massive penalties.
here's the moral reason why: forcing ID creates tools for administering punishment/"accountability", but it does this in advance of something being judged as wrongdoing. basically prior restraint on a mass scale. and when the government promulgates ID technologies it promulgates tools for this abuse of liberty.
Since I'm in the UK (grumble grumble Brexit) I haven't kept up that much despite being a Norwegian citizen, but in some countries at least this in theory IDs issued to certain standards by private actors. E.g. Norway has MinID (government issued), BankID (bank issued, also allows bank logins), Commfides and BuyPass, all of which issues id's that you can use to log in or sign with that tie your signature to the Norwegian national ID number.
Many of the countries makes extensive use of these IDs. E.g. in Norway you can log in to most government services with any of the recognised providers, and can sign contracts and even marriage licenses with them.
Interestingly Norway and Estonia appears to be the only two countries that have submitted more than one eID scheme to the European Commission for acceptance across the EEA, and interestingly for Norway both of them are privately provided; the (lower security) government run ID scheme has not been submitted:
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/wikis/display/E...
You could just as easily have pointed to Ukraine or other Good Western Democracies countries that also have forms of digital citizenship.
Not all 'ideas' are 'good ideas'. Especially when governments only care about more control and once they do something unpopular, then they will abuse their 'emergency powers' to surveil, track and shutdown any unrest until the people comply. Even if it means freezing their bank accounts (and bypassing the banks) or shutting down ATMs to prevent cash withdrawals.
All possible with digital IDs and CBDCs.
[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-oauth-selective-d... [2] https://openid.net/specs/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issu... [3] https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/#what-is-a-verifiabl...
> Soon, we are planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web. This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress
> We’re committed to giving you more control over your audience on Threads – our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service
https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/introducing-threads-new-ap...
Small Mastodon communities can choose to not federate, but they would be missing out on a lot, assuming ActivityPub takes off.
I haven't defederated Threads on my instance as it has so far not become a problem. They can easily become one if they for example start pushing up ads into the stream.
Most Mastodon users have what they want, they aren't really missing out on anything. Except ads and spying mainly.
As for missing out, I guess it's a matter of perspective. I would assume that right now most Mastodon users have at least one more account on a mainstream corporate social media site - Twitter, Instagram, whatever. What they are missing out from Mastodon, they get on other places.
But if we imagine a scenario where ActivityPub becomes mainstream and all providers start supporting it, there are two totally different experiences.
An experience of a person on a server that federates with everyone could mean having just one account and follow everything from one place. For example Twitter would support ActivityPub so you can follow Twitter users without an account there. You could follow a Youtube channel and have it in your feed. The owner of the channel wouldn't need to create a separate account on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, or something - their channel is their followable account on all platforms.
The experience of a person on a small mastodon server that defederates from big corporate servers would be exactly as is today. To follow users of Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Youtube, etc you'd maintain another account. But in the future where ActivityPub is mainstream, that other account is also activitypub-compatible. So, why have two when one is less "powerful" than the other?
Letting the imagination run wild, in such future scenario ActivityPub feeds could be integrated deeply into your iOS/Android phone UI, without needing a separate app. Perhaps also on TV. Most people will want an account that doesn't limit them.
They can also post as their users. Like YouTube, when you look at a video, they put ad videos there in the start and in between, so they could do something like that by posting ads on influencer accounts.
They can also reward the people themselves for posting ads.
Anyhow, I already got one spam message on Mastodon from that browser-embedded instance, Vivaldi, because they didn't do a great job in vetting their users. I was already ready to block them if I receive another, but I never did.
They will find a way to push garbage on ActivityPub I have no doubt.
Regarding defederation, there are different levels. Typically you would silence the instance but allow people to follow single accounts from there.
If it's more powerful to be fully open, then an email client without a spam filter would be superior to one with a spam filter.
Twitter is moving towards closing up their network from users not signed in. EU is making it mandatory for social networks to be interoperable though, so that pulls to the other direction. In any case, it's not a great future for the big social network corporations because people can choose to have either what they offer or roughly the same without ads or tracking.
Wait Threads already support ActivityPub? I thought this was coming later?
I think a whole nation is too big for one server of course. But some kind of breakdown based on reasonable subsidiarity would be great. In the US, maybe it would be counties. Sort of like phone numbers, you may choose to keep your original area code even after you move, or eventually maybe you update and move your account to the new server when you settle in.
This just shows that Mastodon isn’t fit for this use case.
I mean an IT department, having to manage resources, load, live traffic, just for what?
A PA that will ‘benefit’ (as a gimmick) a tiny fraction of the citizens.
chances are this was just allocated a small number of initial resources as it was never intended to hit a high traffic page like HN
For a government server, they sure didn't allocate much in terms of resources.
Is this a state-operated social network for its citizens or is it a public announcements platform?
Because if it's PA then going with Mastodon seems pretty excessive
also the fact that they allow other users on the instance seems pretty strange. shouldn't the only accounts be from the government members?
Then they removed any mention of twitter from from the second message.
2. if the tweet was from the government then why couldn't they also put up something on a webpage on their own sites?
IIUC, they did. That website being https://social.overheid.nl/
Or am I missing something?
The tweet / Twitter is the issue.
A Mastodon instance is something the issuer of the message controls. Twitter is not.
Web sites don't "notify" people of content, but social media does.
Twitter is a place where people share their thoughts. Mastodon is also a place (well, places, but that's irrelevant) where people share their thoughts.
Sometimes people say interesting things, sometimes not. What's your point?
TLS cert is signed by QuoVadis Trustlink, so probably not mastohost (which uses Let's Encrypt).
> The NL government Mastodon instance was realised by @ictu on behalf of @avhuffelen (State Secretary for Kingdom Relations and Digitalisation)
And @ictu is https://www.ictu.nl/about-us#
> As independent consultant and executor within the government [..] ICTU’s professional field is the digital government.
They don't say who is running the daily operations though. My guess is that it's run by a team within the same department (Digitalisation), not a third party.
For mastodon to be successful, people need a neutral ground.
People don't care to join a server for functional programming that then turns into a server for anarchism at which point they get kicked out because they're not an anarchist or the wrong kind of anarchist.
Governments are the obvious providers of such neutral ground.
Quite the opposite. They're as non-neutral as anarchists except have literally the inverse positions on major issues (which they enforce with violence.) That's hardly neutral.
As for people caring about a server for functional programming or some other niche, I believe this is just a temporary state of Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's such an early and experimental technology.
I believe that in the near future there will be multiple large corporate hosted social networks supporting ActivityPub (running on Mastodon or something else, doesn't matter) and then the choice becomes clear for an average user - who do they want handling their data. There could be a Google activitypub service, something from Facebook (they said Threads will support it), different media companies could run their services. Phone networks and ISPs could offer ad-free instances bundled with internet and phone plans. And, of course, there will still be a ton of small niche communities owned by enthusiasts for a variety of topics.
Celebrities and companies will most likely host their own instances, because an account on an official well-known domain acts as verification.
The fediverse itself will be a neutral ground.
We see more and more specialised instances by institutions, but they all have the same default look. Themes could integrate theses instances into the default corporate design while keeping the functionality the same.
The public sector should endorse, invest in, and wherever appropriate use public goods and open source.
Best success with the initiative. Dont look back, there is nothing there but greed and manipulation.
Namely, when going alternative to Big Tech, be sure you have real and solid "cybersecurity" teams in place. They will have to work with IAPs, datacenters, carrier transit providers, have excessive monitoring in place to detect intruders (almost military grade).
Those teams will have HUGE powers, they must be limited to securing the quality and availability of the service, NO MORE.
My intent is not to be hurtful, but is that a bit too much naive?
But in the general case: yes. That is the same concern that a government-operated telephone network enables them to record the private conversations of all their citizens, and that every commercially-operated e-mail provider on US soil enables the government to read all mails of all users. It doesn't seem to raise much concern.
The US (and other governments) run and maintain a lot more complicated digital infrastructure, it's just that a Mastodon server like this is likely run by two interns with a Digital ocean gift card
Germany has social.bund.de as well as a couple of public service broadcasters (like ZDF who run zdf.social).
I assume it's because Europe is adverse to American companies, and I assume that culture wise America will never adopt these kinds of strategies, but I'd like to hear from others on this.
Would you care to expand on that, or should we just use our imaginnation?
I assume you are Elon's alt?