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Mastodon can be both a website and a federated microblogging platform.

My thinking is: governments already have a website. So now you’re asking citizens to go to two different places to seek out information instead of one.

Or worse: now the government feels they need to post on: their own website, Twitter, threads, Facebook, mastodon, etc.

They already do.

Government has found it easier to go where the people are than to try to lead the people to water they won’t drink.

Exactly. So there is no added benefit to this beyond the usual methods of government officials making accounts on every network. Negating the entire original comment about how this "makes more sense than Twitter".

Twitter was rate limiting people and those people affected could not see government posts if they exceeded their quota. So in that strict sense it is quite reasonable.

Several government entities where I am left after the blue checkmark fiascos meant people were trying to impersonate the official accounts.

None of this is exclusive to Mastodon. They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that isn't federated.

"They could have done the same on Facebook or any other network that they don't control and can't rely on"

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.

They are there too. https://www.government.nl/contact

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.

People go to a gov website when they know they need to get information or get something done. Social media is a way to push information out about new policies etc.

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.

You can ask citizens to go to your website to stay informed, but they will turn around and complain that nobody told them about X,Y,Z because they're not naturally going to the website on a regular basis unless they have an immediate need. Elected officials will turn on you and blame you for not meeting the citizens where they already are.

Public broadcasting exists in Europe. In fact they were established precisely for this purpose all the way back before internet in the 1930s.

Really you don't need Twitter to stay informed- very few people actually follow government tweets and most of them are journalists.

Well, usually governments don't just have one website. Different entities use different channels for official communications + Twitter which is the one everyone reads. Why not have a governments official mastodon for the governments official communication interoperable with the network everyone else is on?

Why can't the government website not have a widget/subpage showing the latest Mastodon posts?

If I had to guess it is because it is already developed, in a format people can already understand and is dynamically configurable to do what they want now and could change in the future.

Think of it like RSS, but for tiny updates. You'd visit the site to do website type of things, but you don't want to visit daily in case there's an update.

Hosting mastodon instances costs money. It makes sense that the "digital town square" is at least partially funded and maintained by the public, i.e. the government.

Commodity small mastodon instance hosting is modestly priced, compared to large org budgets

https://masto.host/pricing/

The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.

This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.

There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss

Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody

> Effective outreach means being everywhere people are.

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.

That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it.

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.

Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads. Which kind of illuminates my point, for this to become standard we need far better implementation details than what activitypub currently describes. Until that happens, this is just another "social network" to join and keep up with, or ignoring it entirely to rely on some other social network.

> Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads.

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.

> This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks.

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.

It's just an alternate implementation of RSS / push notifications / etc.

A "twitter feed" is just a website and propagation of posts, comments to posts, etc. Right?

Yeah and you can implement ActivityPub without using Mastodon, if they want to. So you could have something that looks more like WordPress (or actually is, but hopefully not), but is compatible with the "fediverse" ecosystem. And RSS, of course

If you publish on a website, discussion about what you posted happens in a fragmented way across the various social sites (like we're doing here). If you publish on a social site you're saying "let's talk about this here". Conversations about what you posted might spring up elsewhere, but they become secondary. That's desirable if you want to have a moment when you're done addressing all of the comments.

No strong reason, but Mastodon allows various goverment officials and agencies to create accounts on the same server and probably has more functionality baked in than most self-hosted alternatives. It's got a better interface than a CMS and even allows those government officials to follow and interact with other accounts in an official capacity.

Personally it feels ready-made for government presence on the web.

Wordpress for one to many.

How would your average user "follow" several wordpress websites aggregated in a single timeline?

RSS? I imagine ActivityPub is the Mastodon analogy.

Very few people are going to bother going to the Dutch government's website every day to see what's going on with the Dutch government. They might be sufficiently interested to follow an account or two. I follow a couple of the European Commission's accounts (they also have a Mastodon instance), and occasionally find them interesting; I certainly can't see myself regularly going to the EC's horrible website, tho.

Yes. And very few still are going to adopt RSS software and a life workflow to check it only to approximate the aggregation feature already a first class feature of a social media platform.

Let's remember the general public are not the same users as "us"

Yes, a website with an RSS feed is the most basic thing the government should use for communication. This also avoids the question of who to peer with. Anyone can request the RSS feed.

Mastodon also provides an rss feed.

“You can follow any Mastodon account via RSS by just adding ".rss" to the end of the account's public profile URL.”

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456

It _is_ also a website, hosted by themselves: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local

Mastodon is a website, which is well-suited for discussion and broadcasting. Yes you could create a website and often the agencies do also that - for presenting more static information. But Mastodon etc. already solve the problem of discussion and "following" some specific party or "thread".

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.

what is a mastodon instance if not "a website"?

Same as tv vs social networks: communication can be bidirectional, and a specific news can be shared and discussed more easily

What advantage do citizens get by needing to know and personally keep the individual websites for their govt comms

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.

I am not going to go to 41 different government agency websites every day just to see if they want to tell me something important.

But I will follow them on social media so that I can see all their updates in one place.