TL;DR:
Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.
Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.
User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.
Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
Article translated in English :
Confederation closes its Mastodon instance
Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.
As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.
In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.
Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.
Too few active users
On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.
On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.
The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
“We’ve also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular.”
Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).
It’s accessibility, and it’s also sovereignty.
Another way of rephrasing this decision is “we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X”. Which is pretty questionable.
As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.
People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.
But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.
With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.
Yes definitely for hard of hearing and hard of sight people it can be an accessibility issue. I’m mostly deaf myself.
But comparing the situation for abled people in the way it was above doesn’t really work.
I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It’s an awful choice, but you could still do it…
The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn’t really a choice.
I can’t throw myself up the stairs. Go in g down isn’t the problem, I could scooch down on my bum. (but then I would need someone to carry my wheelchair down).
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Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch’s distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of “optional.”
Gender-affirming surgery is “optional.” Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.
(I’m looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord)
This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.
There isn’t much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.
A good quality open source “federated discord” would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn’t much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
Discord is just high quality and
What are you smoking and can you share the contact info of your dealer?
Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.
From what I saw it was actually rising. A lot of Brazilian signed up when X was banned in their country and all the indicators are going up it seems. I don’t know where they got their numbers, to me it feels like they needed an excuse to cut costs.
9 out of 10 porn bots prefer X
imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram
Countries will get what they want from X or Instagram either way, see Brazil.
Decisions like these are why they can’t move away from proprietary platforms. How much does it really cost to host and maintain this? A single employee could host a mastodon, peertube, and lemmy instance. The employee could also work full-time on one of the projects to address issues.
They also only had 6 accounts on the instance - out of how many politicians and bureaus?
Anyway… shame.
The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
While it’s nice, I also don’t think the government should spend time and money on a platform that people obviously don’t use much.
extra workload
I assume they’d use syndication software that could plug into mastodon as well as the proprietary networks. If they’re already syndicating posts between twitter Facebook and Instagram one more network shouldn’t be too much effort.
The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
They’ve yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They’ve run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase. People are actively looking for an alternative to Twitter, it’s just that the vast majority of people have no idea that Mastodon, Lemmy, or the Fediverse on the whole exists. That’s a double edged sword. Better content moderation with lower numbers, better social media infrastructure building becomes the norm with greater numbers.
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase.
Um, nope.
George Takei is on Mastodon. I’ve yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.
Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.
The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn’t lure anyone into the Fediverse.
Mastodon is too hard for common folks and still miss some functionality. It is unfortunate none has forked it yet into something better and mastodon keeps being the largest platform by a far amount.
The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.
There’s also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.
There’s Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won’t be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.
If you want something with more power, something that’s much more like Facebook, there’s Friendica and has been since 2010.
If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there’s Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks “the Fediverse” needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn’t have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
And so forth.
I know all those projects (I host akkoma, besides this lemmy instance) but still my point stands, everyone new to the fediverse will first get in touch with mastodon and its bad design because it is by FAR the most popular platform.
@celsiustimeline @Yorick the most important thing is people to know about activitypub protocol. softwares like mastodon, misskey pixelfed or even threads are just tools that serve activitypub
Do you explain the Internet to your grandparents by explaining HTTP first?
Sorry to say, but the Fediverse would be a great deal smaller if it wasn’t for millions of Twitter users who were railroaded straight to mastodon.social, not knowing anything about it except that it’s allegedly “literally twitter without musk”.
There are still people who have been on Mastodon since shortly after Musk bought Twitter out, and who shit brix upon discovering for the first time that the Fediverse is, in fact, surprisingly, who woulda thunk it, not only Mastodon.
These people wouldn’t be here, had their introduction to the Fediverse started with an explanation of ActivityPub.
Vraiment dommage :(
It’s still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn’t block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.
They’re complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?
It’s still on and will close at the end of the month. But yes I’m very annoyed that they didn’t share much of the instance outside a small notification on the admin.ch website. But the goal of this whole pilot test is that if Mastodon became big within the year, they would already have an instance running with officials accounts. But instead I guess they will focus on Bluesky.
Yeah… If your government is so poorly implemented you can’t even maintain a mastodon instance, you probably have bigger problems…
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The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total. Seriously, what did they expect?
As many followers as they’ve built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?
And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?
I wish they were wrong, but they aren’t. The top posts on any given day on Mastodon get ~100 interactions and a handful of comments. The number of active users on Masto has declined by ~35% in the last year alone. Not to mention Mastodon has way too many things that make it difficult to use and understand outside of federation.
I take solace in the fact that Zuck actually almost certainly reads my comments giving him shit about his AR/VR trash.
LOL, like I write a same comment I got deleted on Fediverse but it lives well on Instagram and X? The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.
The Fediverse is not one thing. It’s a bunch of different sites that are interconnected. You can join a site that has strict moderation, or you can join one that has no moderation at all.
Personally, I’m not here because I think moderation on Instagram and X is too active. Rather to the contrary.
It is telling that you consider moderation “censorship”
Depends on what you get moderated for. I once posted a question about trans people and I got banned from some Lemmy.ml community because they thought I was trolling them. I wasn’t.
It’s just sometimes hard for moderators to know what kind of person they are dealing with. But someone’s posting history is usually enough to see if they are trolling or not.
Also what is trolling. It’s supposed to mean that you intentionally upset people for fun. How can anyone know if it’s intentionally or not. To some people, asking a question is trolling because they don’t see why anyone would ask that if they didn’t try to upset people.
So… It’s interesting.
My point is that the word censorship carries a connotation of trying to suppress certain types of speech. While that may be true in some cases, for the most part if I get moderated it’s for an opinion I can understand or disagree with. In either case it’s an opinion. I’m not a victim. On some instances though, yeah censorship is kind of a thing. On .ml, anything seen as not extremely left wing gets deleted or banned, and that’s bad. But I can just avoid that shitty instance. No one owes me the “right” to be heard in every context.
The thing is, i think social media today has created a lot of censorship out of necessity. There are people out there who just aren’t mature or intelligent enough to have a conversation without insulting or pushing people down.
And because of they, we all suffer. We get over-moderated, we get called trolls etc.
I think I would like a platform where people actually have to act like adults. But that’s hard. Hacker news have kind of made it, but they are also well known for not being open minded at all.
You can always make your own instance and moderate your own comments.
Be aware that no one is forced to keep federated with your instance.
For better or worse, the moderation policies of Lemmy.world is seen as “the fediverse”.
Almost everyone decided to use that instance, so… It’s the default choice still.
Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.
It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like Fediverser could include an indicator of moderation level - for example “relaxed” if few instances are defederated, “moderate” if moderation is more active, and “strict” for more restrictive communities. Data from Fediseer might be useful in this regard.
That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn’t have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.
The biggest problem, I guess, is that it’s a lot of work, and I certainly don’t have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)
The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.
“The pirates code… Be more like… guidelines.”
If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.
If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.
For something to be deleted on the fediverse you would need to have no instance and no followers lol
