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Comment by LelouBil | Hacker News Reader

I hope that this will push government officials and structures to set up mastodon instances. Like one for the government where each agency has an account.

Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)

[0] https://social.network.europa.eu/

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I’m surprised that the pro sports leagues haven’t tried this given all of their complaining about abuse on Twitter and IG.

NBA teams are about to start paying middle-of-the-road players $60M per year, hiring a full-time mod team to support an official mastodon instance should be a drop in the bucket for them.

+ is great when you want to censor something that one of the players said but they refuse to delete it. Could also just straight up make everything players say go through a review queue and only approve things manually, skipping anything that could cause drama.

Not saying that this would be better/worse for the public/players, but I certainly could see why the owners/companies would want to silo the players voice into platforms they themselves own.

The NBA and NBAPA just signed a CBA through 2030, if this does happen it won't be any time soon (and I doubt it would, banning players from using a social media site is pretty far reaching).

Pragmatic, but a marketing move like that has far-reaching consequences -- both in their relationships with social media companies and the normies that look up mastodon and associate it with "hackers."

This is perfect for a company like ESPN. They have enough sports writers working for them that they could instantly create the place sports talk happens.

It's legally hairy in the United States for the government to moderate Internet platforms. As I recall, some public officials were taken to court over blocking people on the site formerly known as Twitter. There's a court case pending against the government right now regarding its communications with platforms during the COVID crisis.

Oh but registration would be closed for the public.

In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.

It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.

legally woolly in Mastodon's case

Why would a government spend the time and effort to create accounts on a social media network which only reaches .1% of their population?

I don't think it would only reach .1% of their population.

It's talking about replacing all of the Twitter accounts of government agencies with accounts on a central mastodon instance for the government, that would serve the same "information broadcasting" purpose. I'm not talking about people having to create mastodon account or choose an instance or even use mastodon.

I think far more than .1% of people can read a public mastodon feed for information from their government

The very fact you need to create an account on twitter to view tweets should be a blocker for any gov't communication. That twitter rate-limited views is another strike against them. Government information should be open access. I don't know if activitypub is the answer, but they need to get off twitter.

Yes, self-hosted Mastodon are the best way to share official short messages like that. Proprietary consumer services like Twitter should be avoided because it is hard to even register an account there (my attempt was banned instantly) and this egoist idi*t made tweets unavailable to be read without an account.

also Germany: https://social.bund.de/ and the Dutch: https://social.overheid.nl/@minbzk

I’d love for this to happen, if I had the expertise I’d sell hosted mastodon/activitypub servers.

Make it as easy to spin up as slack or discord for an org and you’re golden.

“Mastodon’t”. I’ve never thought about or seen it before, but that’s a great name that all the detractors could use.

Lol, I always make this mistake because in french the word for mastodon is "Mastodonte".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mastodonte

Mastodon: Extinct elephant-like mammal

> man what would be a great name for a new and fledgling platform?

> IDK, Mastodon sounds good.

Same people criticizing X for being a bad name. (it probably is, coz i dont know how they'll replace tweeting and retweets and all that, but still)

Yes, nothing cooler than joining a social network run by your government.

I'm not talking about joining, registration would only be allowed for government officials and institutions.

The usefulness would be a feed of official information, like what is being posted on Twitter by these same agencies right now.

But if they use something like Mastodon, everyone is free to read this information publicly or comment on it or do anything really.

> TRENDING NOW

> #EU

> 5 people in the past 2 days

I see it's going viral.

I'm not sure what you mean, this address serves as a perfect way to see the latest short form information about EU institutions (even more so now, because of the ongoing twitter situation) regardless of the amount of posters.

I just think it's hilarious that something posted by less than 3 people a day can be considered trending.

Mastodon == good

Government regulation and call for facist authoritarianism == evil

Europeans do not have free speech and it is making it populace much poorer. Don't hold it up as a standard to aspire to.

What? Can you give some examples on how a different free speech definition make Europeans poorer?

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