EDPS decentralised social media pilot: the end of a successful story

There is no Political Goal or Purpose like reduce Price so everyone can afford healtcare or education. Basically the Political goal of Social Media as a system is nonexistent so far.

The system we have today, was built because it became technically possible to provide Broadcast capability to everyone for Free.

Prior to its arrival you had to literally own a movie studio or a newspaper or a tv/radio station or license radio spectrum to do BROADCASTING ie get you message to as many as possible. You could put up a website sure, but the chances of anyone finding it without access to the above broadcasting methods (to spread the word) would be 0.

Even after the internet appeared and connected everyone up, sending broadcasts to the whole planet via TCP/IP would cause routers to melt down or get you kicked off the network.

Thanks to moores law, all that changed, and routers could handle crazy loads, and suddenly allowing people to Broadcast was possible.

No one asked why is such capability required? What problems does it solve?

Instead the technical focus went towards - how do we handle the Info Explosion that was a consequence. Everyone was connecting to the same network and everyone was broadcasting. Simultaneously. So How are people going to get noticed if everyone is speaking? How does music emerge out of millions playing their own tunes without a conductor?

The answers were half baked because there was never any goal to this system. The answers being Page Rank and the Like/Follower Button. Both creating an entire new set of problems involved never ending spam and gaming of the ranklists. So the focus shifted again to how do we get better Quality results.

And tech response was to collect Personal data. Opening the gates to Advertising and influence/attention wars. So the "answers" keep creating new problems.

With all these distractions, the original question still remains unanswered - why do we all need these systems? Why do we all need to be broadcasting? When is it producing something good? When is it not? When is it required either way? when is it not required either way?

We dont need to be building all kinds of garbage to handle an info explosion if these questions have answers and lead to clear political goals.

The pilot experiment was one year. It was actually renewed a second year.

Now they were at the end of the pilot, and thus a decision had to be made about making it a permanent/long term thing with its own resources and funding, or not.

And it two years, barely 40 representatives migrated there. Therefore their resources to protect privacy are better spent improving the areas where 90+% of the representative actually are.

Like I said in my other comment, ultimately I think this is the better move, because having a dedicated "clean" plateform would automatically lead to slighly less effort to try and make the "big ones for the public" clean.

Public sector still hasn't realized most of it is actually an IT company providing judicial, law enforcement, healthcare, education and insurance services and still mistakenly believes that outsourcing their core information management to 3rd parties is a good move.

For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹.

A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast.

Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity. Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social.

1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real.

² https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed...

That's wrong. The Bundeskanzler is not part of the Bundestag but part of the constitutional body Bundesregierung.

Anyways: https://social.bund.de/exists and is used by many authorities. Trouble is: They want to be where an audience is.