The Dutch government has officially launched their Mastodon server, at social.overheid.nl. The server came online over the weekend, and today the Alexandra van Huffelen, State Secretary of Digitalisation, announced that the server has officially been taken into use. The server is hosted on the domain overheid.nl, the official domain of the Dutch government.
This is good to see, assuming that is, it will be used for good and honest purposes. I have little trust or faith in any government these days.
Good or bad government needs a channel to communicate with its people. Considering twitter was blocking tweets for people without accounts, this is a great step.
PR and communication purposes. You shouldn’t be afraid of what official government accounts do; you should be afraid of what psi-ops paid by government officials do - and that can be on any account and system, be it facebook, twitter, reddit, or whatever.
Consider also that all government entities require some sort of infrastructure to operate, and this covers government subsidies, scholarships, complaints about a sinkhole appearing under your house, Tsunami alerts, or getting information about your parking tickets.
If those services reside on their own servers, it’s government-owned and paid by your taxes. If they reside on Elon Musk’s private servers, reside in a country you don’t live in, is spying for governments you don’t even belong to, what the hell is your government doing there?
Even if it’s PR, even if it’s propaganda, there is nothing inherently wrong about using open source software residing on tax-funded facilities. That’s the way it should be.
You know why carrots are orange, Dutch made them orange to honour the king. Carrots are literally Dutch propaganda.
It’s not like every government doesn’t already run websites with…information, right? Mastodon will be a platform we might be able to talk back on!
How could it possibly be worse compared to them being on Twitter?