askswitzerland

The swiss governments will do it like always: Five years too late, try to create and establish an own IT system, probably a twitter clone, somehow give the project to "Die Post" or an even worse IT firm, which then gets cancelled because of security concerns a few months afterwards, loosing millions.

It would like to see some federal instances where all cantons, communities and police would post their updates.

Edit: Typos

This should be two different questions. Since I know little about the Swiss government just answering generally:

Should ditch Twitter?

Unambiguously, objectively yes. Twitter’s reputation as a “public square” is gone, and it cannot now be relied upon to disseminate information. If I’ve already used my limited API calls a day scrolling through my feed for like an hour, I now can’t see official government informational postings? Not to mention the absurdly common outages now, the ridiculous content policies, the fake blue check system, and all the other stupidity that Musk has shoved into the system.

Really we shouldn’t ever have been using any privately held system for this (because such mishandling of the service was always a possibility), but Elon’s change have made it objectively unworkable for that purpose even on its best day.

Should ditch it for Mastadon/etc?

This is a harder question to answer easily, but I still think yes. The argument against it is that a relatively tiny fraction of people use Mastadon still, and public entities do need to be where the public can see it. The counter argument for that is that people who don’t use Mastadon now can still click a link and open a website to view a Mastadon feed, and no one needs any more knowledge about what Mastadon is to view that feed. And then people who DO know Mastadon can follow those accounts, toot replies, etc.

Swiss government isn't going to ditch twitter anytime soon. Nothing moves this quickly in the Swiss government. But it would be an excellent time to create their own instance and give it a try.

Once twitter truly goes to shits they can simply switch their primary focus.

I'm absolutely in favour of cantons and the federal government itself creating their own mastodon servers to make announcements from. Regular people could interact with them, but only official entities would have user accounts there. I could imagine accounts like @Winterthur and @Wetzikon, as well as @BAG (plus @OFSP and @UFSP for French and Italian) and @BAFU etc.