EDPS decentralised social media pilot: the end of a successful story
EDPS decentralised social media pilot: the end of a successful story
Two years ago, the EDPS embarked on a pioneering journey to launch two social media platforms, EU Voice and EU Video. The pilot project has proved successful in delivering alternative, privacy-friendly and user-focused social media platforms. It is time to review the results.On 28 April 2022, ...
Things must be hard if the EU can't keep a single Mastodon server up.
This was back in April. They discontinued a pilot project and kept going with a non-pilot solution.
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/112455456338250699
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Thanks, since the page didn't mention where they had gone to I assumed they were just gone.
Gotta say though, not a fan on using subdomains. It would have been better to have everything under social-network.europa.eu (which I just tried and doesn't have a web page). It's not like there's a limit on number of profiles per instance.
I think it kind of makes sense for the EU.
All official sites of the EU are under europa.eu. That's just a rule.
Then there's the social network. But they are completely different branches - you wouldn't necessarily want the Court on the same exact site as the Commission, because even though they are both part of the EU, they are completely different branches. Keeping the Commission (EC) separate from the Court (curia) makes a lot of sense from a Montesquieuan understanding of the state.
If the US institutions joined Mastodon, we probably wouldn't want the Supreme Court, POTUS, and Senate to all be on the same instance, because who would be trusted to run it?
That said, it would be nice if social-network.europa.eu provided a landing page linking all the official profiles of EU institutions.
Wojciech Wiewiórowski was intent on calling mastodon a failure for political reasons. When pressed on the harms of public services using Twitter and Facebook, he defends them on the basis of content moderation. Of course what’s despicable about that stance is that a private sector surveillance advertiser is not who should be moderating who gets to say what to their representatives. Twitter, for example, denies access to people who do not disclose their mobile phone number to Twitter, which obviously also marginalises those who have no mobile phone subscription to begin with.
Effectively, the government has outsourced the duty of governance to private corporations -- without rules. Under capitalism.
The lack of funding on the free world platforms was due to lack of engagement. When the public service does not get much engagement they react by shrinking the funding.
We need the Facebook and Twitter users to stop engaging with gov agencies on those shitty platforms. Which obviously would not happen. Those pushover boot-licking addicts would never do that.
tl;dr: is it a good idea to put Elon Musk in control of who gets to talk to their government?