I hope other governments, small and large, start doing this.
tbh - I am not a fan of state-run media, would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people.
imo mastadon wont suddenly become “state-run media” just because Goverment instances exist.
there are .gov email adresses already, and emails are pretty far from state-run.
since there is (afaik) no verification on mastadon, ill assume that theyll use the goverment instances to prove that @official@goverment is legit.
There is verification of sorts for what it’s worth - you drop some HTML on your website, then tell Mastodon to crawl your website to look for it, and if it picks it up, it verifies that your Mastodon account and website are linked.
It helps for all sorts of use cases beyond “this is a famous person”, since people who run smaller projects can also verify who they are on Mastodon - I have 2 verified links on my profile for example.
Why not have a state-run instance on an open platform? It’s better than relying on a corporation’s platform. The government is ‘the people’ more than corporations are.
Surveillance with neither a warrant nor probable cause.
A private instance on an open platform, by the state, for the state? Sure. Go for it.
True free market solutions inevitably lead to the people abiding by the rules of the rich and powerful.
Anything run by the government has to at the very least PRETEND to listen to people who don’t have a financial interest in the enshittification of every part of society.
Just the opposite, I would argue…the role of the state should be to keep a market free so that open & standard-based solutions can replace vertical & proprietary solutions.
You mean fair, not free. The only way to avoid the tyranny of the powerful is regulation restricting their freedom to abuse their powers.
THAT’S what the government is supposed to do to a market: help the small to regular sized fish and cooperation between them by, amongst other things, erecting fences keeping off the sharks that would otherwise immediately eat them.
Also stuff with plants, I guess, but this ocean analogy is probably long and complicated enough already 😂
lol! yes, we likely agree. A free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies, and artificial scarcity.
This isn’t that though. Running a federated service instance is more akin to them having to abide by the rule of the people than the status quo where Musk or Zuck could boot them from their platform or hide anything they don’t like without any reason at all.
In the fediverse, they’re choosing to run a self-hosted outlet that can interact with other privately or publicly run services. It’s like them choosing to run their own email servers instead of their officials all using gmail accounts.
The free market solutions have just led to unelected billionaire oligarchs controlling the narrative. With this federated stuff, no single entity can control the narrative (once all the kinks are ironed out like vote manipulation, exploits, etc)
Decentralized yet federated open platforms are part of the free market - and a victory of the free market. Consolidating media into an empire is a problem … but … ultimately … a problem the free market can solve, as long as the role of government keeps a free market free.
would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people
you mean like facebook? haha!
like lemmy! of course.
Why would a government subject itself to potential censorship of whatever admin is running their instance? It makes perfect sense for a government to host their own instance from where they can freely broadcast announcements.
And the free market has proven to be unreliable. You’re subject to whatever billionaire is ego-tripping at the top of whatever platform you’re using. The will of the people is nowhere to be seen.
Why shouldn’t the state be subject to the same whims as its citizens? How else will the state have skin in the game?
To me, the free market has produced both Lemmy and Mastodon - I wouldn’t count it out just yet.
So Lemmy and Mastodon instances are free market solutions, unless a government does it? I don’t even understand what your point is.
For media, a state platform in order of goodness:
non state (open) platform > non state (closed) platform > State owned platform
most times when the state takes an action it deprives it’s citizens of the beneficial outcomes of that action (skill, monetary).
Which would be better - open instances in each country where the state ( country and regional/s) is a participant along with its citizens?
Or instances where the state and its infinite power is private and above the people the state would govern?
My reaction is not to a state using mastodon nor twitter for that matter. My reaction is to a state running mastodon separate from the people.
I think you’re fundementally misunderstanding the purpose of these state instances. They’re a one-way broadcast channel from the government to the people. It’s not a social platform and no one except the government can create an account.
Why is that a good or better thing?
It’s not worse or better than a social platform. It’s an entirely seperate tool. Broadcasting your official government messages through a community owned by other people that could delete your comments on a whim is not ideal. The people have already decided to put the owners in power through democratic elections, which are lightyears beyond the whims of narcisistic billionaires, admins and biased social media polls.
It verifies that what you are seeing is actually from a government agency. Like how .gov as a TLD verifies that you’re in a government website.
You’re really fundamentally misunderstanding this whole situation. This is like the government running their own webserver to host a blog. It’s not government controlling anything.
