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Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

I can't understand why government offices for many countries are still on Twitter. At least Germany has their own mastodon service, but my home country Finland still uses Twitter.

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I understand why everyone is one Twitter - because people and important people/orgs are there. What I don't understand is, why not also publish the posts on a Mastodon account. You don't have to engage there, but at least don't force people to use Twitter.

> I understand why everyone is one Twitter

False premise, most people are not on Twitter. Outside of Japan and the US, comparatively few people use Twitter.

In Pakistan Twitter is banned (and blocked by ISPs) because Twitter won't ban the accounts of people/orgs the Pakistani State doesn't like. So, Twitter is not accessible in Pakistan without VPN (which are psuedo banned as well).

Yet, all the politicians (both government and non-government), media personalities, and many state run institutions actively run Twitter accounts. So it is one of the primary ways to understand what they are saying.

I don't have a problem with public bodies being on Twitter, but they should definitely be on somewhere else too. They need to be where the people are, and people are going other places.

Because most ordinary people are on Twitter and not Mastodon

That's circular, though: the more services become available elsewhere, the easier it is for people to switch.

People don’t move to places without ordinary people for “services”. That’s not how social networks work.

In my experience it is the other way round. The reason people are on Twitter is because politicians are there. If they move the journalists and politically interested will quickly follow.

Ordinary people follow politicians on social media?

Truth social pretty much proves that's the case.

Most ordinary people are on neither

I guess that depends on location but I’ll refine my statement to say ordinary people are overwhelmingly more likely to be on Twitter than Mastodon.

Ordinary people are on neither. The group which is on Twitter are politicians and they can decide to move to Mastodon if they want.

That's a pretty bad argument. For one the majority of people are on neither. For two, it's almost always about reading, and twitter doesn't let you read posts without an account.

That maybe true for Meta services but Twitter was never really a thing in EU.

Twitter was never really big in most European countries. I only have an account to follow AI hype and drama.

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