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Comment by throwa356262 | Hacker News Reader

Governments want to move away from “platforms over which we have no control,” says Dutch minister.

Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?

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Actually European Commission has been on its own Mastodon server for a couple years:

https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local

They do, actually.

For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.

The problem isn't setting up the servers, they already exist for the most part. It is getting anyone to use them.

I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.

If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?

At my workplace we only use WhatsApp for personal comms. Like chatting about which restaurant we go for lunch, who's at the office tomorrow, when is everyone's birthday, what did we do this weekend, that kinda stuff.

For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.

I mean at least you have teams as an alternative.

Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).

Maybe I'm just too American to understand, but it still baffles me that WhatsApp is used for business purposes. It makes a lot more sense for regular personal messaging, but it seems incredibly unprofessional to me. I would think it bizarre and a bit invasive if my boss tried to text or iMessage me. Are they at least using different accounts for work messaging?

Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...

most of the world is using WA for biz. US is an outlier

Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz

Isn't there a worry about the messages not being private and being read by Facebook? I have that same worry with Google and Apple both.

Alot of people use iMessage or WhatsApp for out of band messaging.

The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.

Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.

You guys use iMessage and go all weird unless the bubble is blue, so I’m not sure why you can’t understand that other countries have their own cultural messaging practices.

WhatsApp is a much nicer platform for business (and messaging in general), and the rest of the world would find the American idea of "professional" rather laughable.

It was kind of a cultural shock that people companies) in the US still leave messages on my voicemail. Last time I remember using the voicemail in the EU was like 2005 or around that time

It is my understanding that a lot of EU governments are setting up their own matrix servers.

This is true. We just published a map of it: https://element.io/en/matrix-in-europe

Question, with so many major orgs using it, are there no plans for manual status? The one thing I miss vis-a-vis teams is the ability to manually set myself away, appear offline, busy etc.

Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)

There's a big gap between lots of orgs using it, and lots of orgs paying for development of it. That said, BWI in Germany is currently funding custom status so it should be coming soon :)

Ohh nice to hear it's coming.

But sorry that they are not contributing. That's pretty bad tbh.

Clicking through and stumbling upon Croatia, which specifies only "Classified deployment", has left me absolutely cackeling. Seems hilarious that they're willing to say that they use it, but unwilling to state if it's for early testing, civilian-level beaurocracy, or Croatia's equivalent of specialized armed forces.

That they publicly use it at all is great though, as it likely helps shift the Overton window of what's normal, and what fits standard useage of Matrix-Synapse

I hope they don't, considering Matrix's handling of security is on the level of a bumbling toddler.

If you're talking about https://matrix.org/blog/2026/02/analysis-of-reported-issues-..., I'm not entirely sure that characterisation is accurate :)

It's more that they haven't gone public with it yet, and it's not for us to out them :)

I'd really want to see more examples of https://social.bund.de

This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.

Here is one of the French government: https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/

Aren't they about to handle DigiD to the U.S? You know, the tool we use for absolutely any sort of identification when interacting with the government?

The fact that many replies mention Matrix and the Politico article does not is hilarious. Why even bother with major news orgs anymore?

They're setting up matrix servers. Nato uses matrix.

Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.

Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.

The key is only necessary as a backup these days. You can share the key from one client to another which works well. As long as the user has a laptop and phone it should be ok unless they lose both.

But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.

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