Reflecting on some of the hurdles for procuring a Fediverse instance for the US Government. There are a lot of hoops to jump through, but is it worthwhile?

In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: “Why didn’t the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?”

Here’s some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don’t consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.

  • delirious_owl
    27·
    8 months ago

    The German government has been doing it for their various agencies for years

    They saw Facebook a national security threat and Twitter getting bought by a censoring fascist was the final straw for a lot of German ministries to switch to accounts on the German government run Mastodon instance.

    • eveninghere@beehaw.org
      21·
      8 months ago

      I like that, but they forced me to use their solutions, which I didn’t appreciate. The only remote communication software they prepared was a horrible free software project that has been in maintenance mode for 20 years… I was surprised to see it compiled. The connection was horrible because it assumed ~'90s technologies.

      • delirious_owl
        7·
        8 months ago

        What are you talking about? Mastodon is actively updated and you can run your own instance to communicate with these German agencies