Official Mastodon server of the Dutch government
I’m surprised at how the EU has been sleeping on this platform. Well maybe not the EU, as the Union itself actually has a server instance for both its organisations and it’s elected officials, but the member countries. Like my own. All our politicians are on social media, but they are all on three platforms, two which are owned by two American billionaires and one which is owned by the Chinese government. All three platforms has massive privacy and democracy issues in terms of how they operate, and none of the content on them are owned by their users. Now I’m all for the EU using regulation to eventually reform something like meta into being a decent enough centralised platform. But why on earth would our institutions be on something they don’t control?<p>With ActivityPub and Mastodon our government could run a server for all our elected officials and then it would be our country that governed what they could and could not post on there. Now, I’m not a political radical, but I do think it’s sort of silly that Meta can dictate and censor what our elected officials can say on a social media. This isn’t an issue for like 99% of them, but the concept is just anti-democratic.<p>The same could sort of be said about our journalists. If we had a press corps server instance, then someone posting that Tibet is a country or whatever “radical” thing you can get banned for, wouldn’t become a conflict of interest. Because they’d be allowed to write that, and our press corp genuinely couldn’t give two shits what China has to say about it.