Public offices using open standards should be the norm.
Exactly. Ever since I can remember I couldn’t comprehend why governments, even the army, so willingly use social media, plaster their logo on their website, and so on. It’s such an obvious bad idea. I mean, why would one willingly make oneself dependent on massive for-profit corporations with a history of scandals every fortnight.
Because that’s where the people are. If your goal is to reach, or be available to, as many people as possible, then using social media sites is necessary (though, I would also argue, insufficient). That being said, I agree that governments shouldn’t allow their data to become trapped in walled gardens and the like, hence the “insufficient” bit.
Edit: As an example, the county I live in posts notices and such on Instagram. They also post the information on their web site, but honestly, I only see them on Instagram. I don’t want them to stop doing that just because Instagram is problematic in various ways. It still exposes me to interesting info that I wouldn’t otherwise go out of my way to find.
The article makes it appear as if this was kind of an official requirement of the Commission for all EU institutions. This is not the case. Take a look at the actual press release by the responsible EDPS. It’s 1) in a pilot phase and 2) use of it by EU institutions is entirely voluntary. There appears to be an unmentioned number of institutions participating in the pilot phase, which however, as far as a quick look on the Mastodon instance reveals, does include at least two prominent members, the Commission itself and the CJEU. The EDPS itself seems not to participate.
I appreciate the news, but it looks shortened to me.
The network is called the ‘fediverse’, not ‘Mastodon’.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Fediverse, is in fact, GNU/Fediverse, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Fediverse.
Mastodon (the software, not a comment on the network) isn’t anywhere near scalable enough for this. All instances I know of that run well* without full-time staff are capped at 5 digits population or below.
This is actually a great use of Mastodon. There will only be a small number of accounts on the EU Voice instance, and then millions of users on other instances can subscribe to it. It’s not that different from a centralized RSS feed.
For the general case where there are millions of users on different instances and random subsets of users all want to subscribe to each others’ feeds, there are scalability problems.
EU Voice provides EU institutions, bodies and agencies with privacy-friendly microblogging accounts that they typically use for the purposes of press and public relations activities. Institutional accounts can be requested from tech-privacy@edps.europa.eu.
That sounds like 5 digits population or below to me.
Public offices using open standards should be the norm.
It is sad that this isn’t the case, and thus still makes the news.
Exactly. Ever since I can remember I couldn’t comprehend why governments, even the army, so willingly use social media, plaster their logo on their website, and so on. It’s such an obvious bad idea. I mean, why would one willingly make oneself dependent on massive for-profit corporations with a history of scandals every fortnight.
Because that’s where the people are. If your goal is to reach, or be available to, as many people as possible, then using social media sites is necessary (though, I would also argue, insufficient). That being said, I agree that governments shouldn’t allow their data to become trapped in walled gardens and the like, hence the “insufficient” bit.
Edit: As an example, the county I live in posts notices and such on Instagram. They also post the information on their web site, but honestly, I only see them on Instagram. I don’t want them to stop doing that just because Instagram is problematic in various ways. It still exposes me to interesting info that I wouldn’t otherwise go out of my way to find.
The article makes it appear as if this was kind of an official requirement of the Commission for all EU institutions. This is not the case. Take a look at the actual press release by the responsible EDPS. It’s 1) in a pilot phase and 2) use of it by EU institutions is entirely voluntary. There appears to be an unmentioned number of institutions participating in the pilot phase, which however, as far as a quick look on the Mastodon instance reveals, does include at least two prominent members, the Commission itself and the CJEU. The EDPS itself seems not to participate.
I appreciate the news, but it looks shortened to me.
The network is called the ‘fediverse’, not ‘Mastodon’.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Fediverse, is in fact, GNU/Fediverse, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Fediverse.
While we’re at it, Mastodon is not ‘private’. It’s social media, the polar opposite.
Mastodon (the software, not a comment on the network) isn’t anywhere near scalable enough for this. All instances I know of that run well* without full-time staff are capped at 5 digits population or below.
*ish
This is actually a great use of Mastodon. There will only be a small number of accounts on the EU Voice instance, and then millions of users on other instances can subscribe to it. It’s not that different from a centralized RSS feed.
For the general case where there are millions of users on different instances and random subsets of users all want to subscribe to each others’ feeds, there are scalability problems.
That sounds like 5 digits population or below to me.
It doesn’t matter that it is not scalable now if this is a use-case that can help make it scalable in the future.
One can easily argue this is a good thing, not a bug. The entire point of the Fediverse is to avoid centralization.
and they launched a PeerTube account :) https://tube.network.europa.eu/