this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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I hope other governments, small and large, start doing this.
Germany (social.bund.de) and the EU (social.network.europa.eu) already have it. I think it's very likely that other governments, especially european ones, will start to do this.
With the internet being so dominated by american voices, I dont think a lot of people have fully appreciated the sentiment change in the higher levels of european governments. Sovereign control over their digital spaces is something that is actually mattering on the level of nation states. Its a way of thinking that is kind of new to most people, as we rarely think about the sovereign powers of nation states, and even less so in the context of the internet. But now were starting to do that again, and it actually matters.
Absolutely. I was on an instance, run by North Americans, that had blocked European Govt instances because they didn’t trust government agencies spying on them etc. Some German users picked up on this and voiced a lot of frustration over it. There was a clear cultural divide. Even more ironic, I think it was the German department of privacy or something to that effect.
Nonetheless, it was quite interesting to see a tension between the small hacker aspect of the fediverse and the “this is the new internet” aspect and how much the US dominated perspective probably completely missed the mark.
EDIT: European Govt from “European” to clarify I was referring to government run instances.
ha yeah I remember that, that was fun.
To riff on this a little bit further: its also visible in how little attention in the gazillion conversations about Threads is paid to the fact that the entirety of the EU cannot even access it yet due to the new DMA and DSA.
Or one of the articles I wrote that got relatively low traction, that was specificially about how all of the Nordic countries got an official recommendation to use ActivityPub for their governmental communications. I dont mind that some articles get less traction than others, but it does stand out when you consider how impactful such things are for the long term structure of the fediverse. Lots of EU governments are now talking about needing sovereign public digital spaces, and are actively looking how ActivityPub can help with that. And that matters way more than whatever Elons latest shenanigans are.
In a way, this gives me hope that the fediverse might actually survive in a way bigger capacity than XMPP did even if Threads/Meta manages to EEE a large part of the fediverse.
Yeah, I think theres quite a few reasons to be hopeful. Also why I personally am not very interested in comparisons to XMPP and EEE. To me, that refers to a different time on the internet, where corporations where way more interested in fighting an opensource threat. But times have changed, and for Big Tech, it seems to me they are way more worried about regulations than about opensource competitors.
Not to say that this automatically means that the fediverse will be a success, not at all, this shit is hard. But to properly judge what challenges await the fediverse, I think its more fruitful to look at what Big Tech is concerned by, and what governments are thinking about. And I see very little talk about EEE from those actors. Instead, its mainly focused on regulations, privacy, and sovereign power.
Oh don't get me wrong, I fully expect Meta to go EEE. That they're not talking about it in those terms makes sense, given that the Embrace part has barely started. Don't want to spook the part of the prey that still feels safe.
I just have a bit of hope that the fediverse might survive it better.
Hey! I was trying to be vague and anonymous!! 😅
But yea ... totally with you!!
For those that don't know, this person is the author of https://fediversereport.com/ and posts here like this.
@[email protected] ... you could add more links and what not to your bio here ... ?
haha well think it mostly worked :D
and thanks for the shoutout! I do need to update my bio and get proper accounts. For now just testing out the water a little bit, havent really fully decided on which server I want to pick. reason Im replying with 2 accounts is that federation between kbin.social and lemmy.ml specifically is still broken, couldnt even see your reply. Not sure how to approach that yet
Oh wow. Didn’t know about the broken federation.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/173366/lemmy-ml-is-no-longer-shadowbanning-kbin#comments
seems like a side effect of lemmy devs being overloaded with info and messages getting on a long backlog
Huh ... that's quite funny and unfortunate.
Curiously enough I've been ranting in some replies about how "The Protocol" maybe requires too much coordination at a software level for its promises of a distributed social network to be taken at face value.
This issue incidentally seems like a prime issue. Like, just looking at it naively, would it not be reasonable that at some level the protocol has some checks built into it such that an instance either is or is not federating with another instance and determining whether that is the case or not is straight-forward?
The arbitrariness of a service called
kbinbotbeing a whole instance's federation request service and the ability to block that by accident without any more declarative data structures verifying or identifying whether federation is successful ... that all smells like a bad system.I'm starting to wonder if there's something to my "concern" compared to other protocols (wish I knew enough to seriously examine it).
I'll stop ranting now ... glad lemmy.ml and kbin are connected again.
How does federating two public instances enable spying
Well it was reflexive choice I think. American anti government sentiment without thinking through whether the instance or government department in question was providing a service that some would benefit from on the fediverse.
America has a lot of problems right now leading to exceptionally low trust in government, even for them.
We're afraid of all government spying, including our own. I just think most Americans don't really understand that other governments, especially in the EU, have significantly better privacy laws and protections for foreigners than America has for its own citizens.
Unfortunately there are people in the EU continously pushing for mass surveilance laws
ARD and ZDF too, probably just as significant because they're some of the biggest media organisations in the world: https://ard.social/explore and https://zdf.social/about
Europe has to build something new that isn't a big corp, that isn't centralized. It has to find its own way, and the Fediverse model is a good beginning. It's to show we can do something but in the European spirit.
I'm pretty new to federation. What can I do with these two instances? Can I somehow follow them with my current account? Or do I have to create a separate account on both instances?
You can follow them from your already existing Mastodon (and maybe kbin?) account.
From my account on mastodon.online I just followed https://social.overheid.nl/@beheerder as a test, and I've already been following https://social.network.europa.eu/@EU_Commission
For some reason my server couldn't find users from the social.bund.de when I pasted the follow-link (like https://social.bund.de/@Zoll )
By the way Mastodon has a very nice interface to subscribe to other instances. Like now when using when following the link in OPs post and opening a web browser, then clicking on a user and clicking follow, it gives the option to sign in to subscribe OR copy a link to subscribe from another instance . Then I just paste that link in the search field in my Mastodon app (logged in to mastodon.online). Hopefully Lemmy will implement that "button to copy link to subscribe from other instance" soon
The British treasury also has/had a discord, obviously not on the same level as a whole Lemmy instance, but it was still pretty interesting
Meanwhile, government and education are still completely (and happily, it seems) shackled to Microsoft and Google, of course.