@anildash Agree, but I wish they'd run their own instance. Right now I have to trust that potus@threads.net's blue checkmark means something...and we've seen a history of blue checkmarks becoming less credible over time (thanks, Elon).
I think we can trust it because there are new articles confirming it. But, that's a lot of work. Why not have and official us.gov instance. How fancy would that be?
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I am hopeful that all governments will do so eventually. I imagine there is a political and legal thicket they have to navigate regarding moderation and federation and there would have to be funding set aside for it and security procedures created.
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I agree I think they have the technical ability. I think the political aspect is much harder. Who decides which servers to defederate with and which users and posts to block? Right now they can point at Meta or Twitter or whomever and say that the decision is out of their hands. On a government run server they have to make those choices and there are no easy answers.
I think for something like government it's more like a broadcasting rss feed than a place where information is collected and curated. They could share posts that they support, and let anyone read and serve their posts.
I'm interested to see if they ever share anything at all. And more important if they EVER share anything not on threads. I'll give them three months to pass this test.
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash I like that idea. Maybe they can disable comments? I remember reading that some Mastodon or Fediverse server has support for that. I think Pixelfed can do it.
Disabling comments is more of a server specific or app based thing. There isn't any one official set of comments that corresponds to any post on the fediverse. I think this is something that is hard to understand coming from walled garden single server social media.
Yes there could be a terrible server where terrible people put terrible comments next to your post. But... we don't see those servers. Who cares?
@futurebird@franktaber@danciruli@anildash I use my real name here, as I do almost everywhere, so I might care about replies on a hate site. If I can’t see them, I can’t choose to turn off comments or delete my post, as I can on Facebook.
as far as servers go they could use akamai, as they do for many, if not most, if not all, of the public-facing websites. but bureaucracy being what it is, being on the fediverse may require an act of congress.
If anything, own fediverse node seems like the perfect social media platform for government/agencies. ".gov" or ".gov.CC" has way more weight than any stupid checkmark without delegating control to (foreign, for most of us) corporate entity.
@futurebird@danciruli@anildash For years we have been able to pay a few bucks to Gmail or Microsoft or a ton of other providers and have our own domain name on our email and website without having to stand up a server and maintain it. There are already ways to do this with fedi, too. But until threads allows its users to break out of their neo-AOL garden and follow external fedi servers, it makes sense for a big account to be on that side of the one-way glass.