They offered their own hosted instance of fediverse social platforms, for a pilot experiment.
After a successful first year, they were renewed for a second year. 40 "institutionnal account" went on there, which seems a lot until you realize it doesn't mean institutions, any MEP qualify, for exemple.
At the end of the days, 40 is just not that high, so the pilot was not extended and allocated funding into a bigger long term project.
Because it was a fediverse integrated platform, they're offering all 40+ account a way to convert into another hosted instance.
They tried, it didn't catch, figuring out if it was worth doing it long term is what the pilot was for.
Personally I'm of two sides, the idea of them owning their own platform seems nice on the surface, but the whole point of social media account is to be where the users are, and also forcing them to use the same platforms the rest of us do also forces them to be facing the same TOS/rules/moderation. Utimately I think it's better this way.
Technical goals and Political goals are always 2 different things. And in this case neither is clearly defined or will be clearly defined, because Social Media was never built with a Goal in mind.
There is no Political Goal or Purpose like reduce Price so everyone can afford healtcare or education. Basically the Political goal of Social Media as a system is nonexistent so far.
The system we have today, was built because it became technically possible to provide Broadcast capability to everyone for Free.
Prior to its arrival you had to literally own a movie studio or a newspaper or a tv/radio station or license radio spectrum to do BROADCASTING ie get you message to as many as possible. You could put up a website sure, but the chances of anyone finding it without access to the above broadcasting methods (to spread the word) would be 0.
Even after the internet appeared and connected everyone up, sending broadcasts to the whole planet via TCP/IP would cause routers to melt down or get you kicked off the network.
Thanks to moores law, all that changed, and routers could handle crazy loads, and suddenly allowing people to Broadcast was possible.
No one asked why is such capability required? What problems does it solve?
Instead the technical focus went towards - how do we handle the Info Explosion that was a consequence. Everyone was connecting to the same network and everyone was broadcasting. Simultaneously. So How are people going to get noticed if everyone is speaking? How does music emerge out of millions playing their own tunes without a conductor?
The answers were half baked because there was never any goal to this system. The answers being Page Rank and the Like/Follower Button. Both creating an entire new set of problems involved never ending spam and gaming of the ranklists. So the focus shifted again to how do we get better Quality results.
And tech response was to collect Personal data. Opening the gates to Advertising and influence/attention wars. So the "answers" keep creating new problems.
With all these distractions, the original question still remains unanswered - why do we all need these systems? Why do we all need to be broadcasting? When is it producing something good? When is it not? When is it required either way? when is it not required either way?
We dont need to be building all kinds of garbage to handle an info explosion if these questions have answers and lead to clear political goals.
I'm glad no more taxpayers money is going to fund such bullshit. Alas, they probably found another irrelevant action to burn money already. In the end this is just a convoluted way to transfer money, ie corruption.
Corporations regularly try stuff only to discover that it doesn't work; rather than being called corruption, this is hailed as "innovation" and leads to quotes such as Edison talking about learning 1000 ways to not make a lightbulb.
Governments are regularly criticised for not being innovative enough, and for continuing to use obsolete ancient technology like fax machines and Latin for so long beyond the point of usefulness that it actively harms the rest of society — quin tu istanc orationem hinc veterem atque antiquam amoves?[0]
What is the innovation you're talking about in this case? They installed Mastodon and created 40 accounts, only to conclude that nobody cares about it (but somehow it's a massive success at the same time). Is that where we are with innovation?
Why is it not innovative? It is a new way of government and citizen interaction, which sounds like it is well worth the attempt. Since it didn’t catch on, the citizens voted, but offering a new communication channel for citizens doesn’t sound like it belongs onto the long list of EU critique
So by extension, there is basically no innovation currently going on right now?
New CPUs arent innovative. x86 is still the same and the rest is just better production technology. New production processes aren't innovative either. EUV is just a different light source anyways. New companies finding uses for generative AI are just OpenAI API wrappers anyways.
Your logic spun to a strict degree would mean that nothing except inventing is innovative, which is an expectation that will not hold up in the real world.
AFAICT they call it a success because the users were happy with the quality of service, and close it because noone wants to fund it. If that reading is correct, then the 40 are happy to use a server paid for out of someone else's budget and think the admin has done a good job, but don't want to become the new admin or pay for running the server.
It reminds me of many stories of open source projects: Happy users — who don't want to pay or take over the work.
IIRC, if a representative posts on one instance and a constituent replies on another, the original poster is unlikely to see the reply. Not a good way to communicate with constituents.
This is not how Mastodon works, the point is exactly that cross-instance communication can work smoothly, and it does. Replies show up on your notifications just like any other similar platform, whether they come from your instance or another.
I haven't used Mastodon much, but I have seen replies that weren't visible. There was a big thread with several generations, some visible to the original poster (who showed me this), some not.
Guessing… server blocking? Grandparent replies (the thread was big)?
Yes and no. They were not cancelled because they cost too much.
The pilot experiment was one year. It was actually renewed a second year.
Now they were at the end of the pilot, and thus a decision had to be made about making it a permanent/long term thing with its own resources and funding, or not.
And it two years, barely 40 representatives migrated there. Therefore their resources to protect privacy are better spent improving the areas where 90+% of the representative actually are.
Like I said in my other comment, ultimately I think this is the better move, because having a dedicated "clean" plateform would automatically lead to slighly less effort to try and make the "big ones for the public" clean.
I'm not sure what they ran, but if it's Mastodon: it scales in troublesome ways.
For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹.
A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast.
Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity.
Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social.
1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real.
More like they couldn't be bothered to use anything else than a "free" service or something with a vendor to bribe them as usual.
Public sector still hasn't realized most of it is actually an IT company providing judicial, law enforcement, healthcare, education and insurance services and still mistakenly believes that outsourcing their core information management to 3rd parties is a good move.
Europe could put quite some weight behind open social media if they would put official accounts like x.com/bundeskanzler on bundestag.de/@bundeskanzler instead.
I think ActivityPub supports putting a "look over there for the actual content" file on a domain, so that technically all you have to do is put a static file on the domain. And then you can use an external service to publish your content.
That is good - in theory. But your if political opponent is strong in the populated corners and you got no visibility it's not a good situation for your campaign.
The only rational project for governments etc in this space to do would be in the cross posting space (with audit trail of what / where / authorisation etc) with a single source of truth on the authoring side.
Given the point is to disseminate information it is all about where the audience is, and increasingly the audience is in multiple places and certainly not where privacy folks are.
I insist that it's absurd trying to beat big tech mimicking their models. A social? Just dress Usenet with some extras (a minimal, readable markup, that render allowing things like video/images embedding in-line for instance) and you get a social no X or Mastodon can beat.
We do not need to copy the big, we need better stuff, and those come from the desktop model. Pushing them cut completely out the big ones because they offer inferior solutions and they can't do otherwise to keep up their business. Try to copy them and nobody will care.
> Unfortunately, despite our efforts to find a new home for EU Voice and EU Video in other EUIs, we have been unable to secure new ownership to maintain the servers and sustain operations at the high standards that EUIs and our users deserve
What does that mean? The server/host they were using shut down? Was it outsourced to like a 'masto.host' or in-house?
That's disappointing: the European Commission has 100k followers on Mastodon (https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission) which seems enough to justify the continuation of this project.
You either misunderstood what you read, or commented something incorrect and out of subject on purpose. I encourage you to offer alternatives from other countries that you think should be followed.
After a successful first year, they were renewed for a second year. 40 "institutionnal account" went on there, which seems a lot until you realize it doesn't mean institutions, any MEP qualify, for exemple.
At the end of the days, 40 is just not that high, so the pilot was not extended and allocated funding into a bigger long term project.
Because it was a fediverse integrated platform, they're offering all 40+ account a way to convert into another hosted instance.
They tried, it didn't catch, figuring out if it was worth doing it long term is what the pilot was for.
Personally I'm of two sides, the idea of them owning their own platform seems nice on the surface, but the whole point of social media account is to be where the users are, and also forcing them to use the same platforms the rest of us do also forces them to be facing the same TOS/rules/moderation. Utimately I think it's better this way.
There is no Political Goal or Purpose like reduce Price so everyone can afford healtcare or education. Basically the Political goal of Social Media as a system is nonexistent so far.
The system we have today, was built because it became technically possible to provide Broadcast capability to everyone for Free.
Prior to its arrival you had to literally own a movie studio or a newspaper or a tv/radio station or license radio spectrum to do BROADCASTING ie get you message to as many as possible. You could put up a website sure, but the chances of anyone finding it without access to the above broadcasting methods (to spread the word) would be 0.
Even after the internet appeared and connected everyone up, sending broadcasts to the whole planet via TCP/IP would cause routers to melt down or get you kicked off the network.
Thanks to moores law, all that changed, and routers could handle crazy loads, and suddenly allowing people to Broadcast was possible.
No one asked why is such capability required? What problems does it solve?
Instead the technical focus went towards - how do we handle the Info Explosion that was a consequence. Everyone was connecting to the same network and everyone was broadcasting. Simultaneously. So How are people going to get noticed if everyone is speaking? How does music emerge out of millions playing their own tunes without a conductor?
The answers were half baked because there was never any goal to this system. The answers being Page Rank and the Like/Follower Button. Both creating an entire new set of problems involved never ending spam and gaming of the ranklists. So the focus shifted again to how do we get better Quality results.
And tech response was to collect Personal data. Opening the gates to Advertising and influence/attention wars. So the "answers" keep creating new problems.
With all these distractions, the original question still remains unanswered - why do we all need these systems? Why do we all need to be broadcasting? When is it producing something good? When is it not? When is it required either way? when is it not required either way?
We dont need to be building all kinds of garbage to handle an info explosion if these questions have answers and lead to clear political goals.
Governments are regularly criticised for not being innovative enough, and for continuing to use obsolete ancient technology like fax machines and Latin for so long beyond the point of usefulness that it actively harms the rest of society — quin tu istanc orationem hinc veterem atque antiquam amoves?[0]
[0] From page 8: https://archive.org/details/michelle-lovric-how-to-insult-ab...
New CPUs arent innovative. x86 is still the same and the rest is just better production technology. New production processes aren't innovative either. EUV is just a different light source anyways. New companies finding uses for generative AI are just OpenAI API wrappers anyways.
Your logic spun to a strict degree would mean that nothing except inventing is innovative, which is an expectation that will not hold up in the real world.
It reminds me of many stories of open source projects: Happy users — who don't want to pay or take over the work.
Guessing… server blocking? Grandparent replies (the thread was big)?
Now we know what to do next time we discuss the need for privacy-friendly and user-focused social media platforms.
The pilot experiment was one year. It was actually renewed a second year.
Now they were at the end of the pilot, and thus a decision had to be made about making it a permanent/long term thing with its own resources and funding, or not.
And it two years, barely 40 representatives migrated there. Therefore their resources to protect privacy are better spent improving the areas where 90+% of the representative actually are.
Like I said in my other comment, ultimately I think this is the better move, because having a dedicated "clean" plateform would automatically lead to slighly less effort to try and make the "big ones for the public" clean.
For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹.
A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast.
Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity. Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social.
1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real.
² https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed...
Public sector still hasn't realized most of it is actually an IT company providing judicial, law enforcement, healthcare, education and insurance services and still mistakenly believes that outsourcing their core information management to 3rd parties is a good move.
Similar to https://www.threads.net/@potus but truly open by tying it to a government controlled domain.
I think ActivityPub supports putting a "look over there for the actual content" file on a domain, so that technically all you have to do is put a static file on the domain. And then you can use an external service to publish your content.
That's wrong. The Bundeskanzler is not part of the Bundestag but part of the constitutional body Bundesregierung.
Anyways: https://social.bund.de/exists and is used by many authorities. Trouble is: They want to be where an audience is.
The indieweb answer for this is POSSE. You stop chasing the audience and you get to be in control of your main communication channels.
Given the point is to disseminate information it is all about where the audience is, and increasingly the audience is in multiple places and certainly not where privacy folks are.
We do not need to copy the big, we need better stuff, and those come from the desktop model. Pushing them cut completely out the big ones because they offer inferior solutions and they can't do otherwise to keep up their business. Try to copy them and nobody will care.
What does that mean? The server/host they were using shut down? Was it outsourced to like a 'masto.host' or in-house?