TL;DR:
Pilot Project Conclusion: The Swiss Federal Chancellery’s Mastodon instance pilot project, launched in September 2023, has ended as the conditions for continuation were not met.
Low Engagement: The six official accounts on Mastodon had around 3500 followers in total, with low engagement rates compared to other platforms like X and Instagram.
User Decline: The number of active Mastodon users globally is decreasing, contributing to the decision to end the project.
Closure: The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
Article translated in English :
Confederation closes its Mastodon instance
Bern, 25.09.2024 - Since September 2023, the Federal Chancellery has been operating a Mastodon instance for the federal administration. The pilot project, limited to one year, ends today as the conditions for its continuation have not been met.
As part of their statutory information mandate, the Federal Council and the federal administration have also been communicating on social media for many years and are constantly examining whether platforms not used until now are eligible.
In September 2023, the Conference of Federal Information Services decided to launch a pilot project on the decentralised Mastodon platform. The Federal Chancellery then opened the social.admin.ch instance, on which members of the Federal Council and departments could manage official accounts. The pilot project was limited to one year.
Mastodon has useful features for government communication. Thanks to its decentralised organisation, the platform is not subject to the control of a single company or to any state censorship. Its source code is open, it complies with data protection and is not driven by algorithms.
Too few active users
On the social.admin.ch instance, three departments managed five accounts, and the Federal Chancellery managed one account for the entire Federal Council. The six accounts of the Confederation had around 3,500 subscribers in total.
On platforms such as X or Instagram, the Federal Council and the Federal Administration reach many more subscribers with comparable accounts. In addition, the contributions of the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration have rather low engagement rates (likes, shares, comments). Finally, the number of active users of Mastodon worldwide is once again falling.
The Conference of Information Services of the Confederation therefore considers that the conditions for continuing the pilot project have not been met, and activities on the Mastodon accounts of the Federal Council and the federal administration are suspended as of today. The social.admin.ch instance will be closed at the end of the month.
FediDB reports that the Mastodon active user count is on the decline the last year, from more than. 1.2 million to 820k thousand. The number seems to maybe stabilize a little, but it appears as a slow decline when studying the last year.
Then again, this is following from a huge bump of new users with the twitter exodus. It’s natural that not all will stick around, so a decline in active user now is not so surprising. It does indicate a lack of ability to move the momentum, but it’s an open source project with very limited funding, not a venture capital startup. It’s not here for explosive growth.
Furthermore, the number of Mastodon users is not a perfect measure. If it was matched by a huge number of users on gotosocial or misskey, it wouldn’t really matter. The Swiss should maybe have waited for Threads to federate both ways before deciding to leave on account of limited interactions.
Anyway, they’re not entirely wrong to say Mastodon is on the decline. But they’re not entirely right either.
Just for the record, I know little about gotosocial, but I’ve looked into Misskey a fair bit and I think it’s irrelevant here.
FediDB data on active users seems off (a low ~12k MAU), but even if the real number is much greater, most are on the flagship instance (misskey.io) which has multiple CSAM censures on fediseer.
Put another way, it’s almost counterproductive to include Misskey in these topics because simply federating with its biggest instance could be a liability for most 1st world western instances.
I doubt the Swiss government would get much out of Misskey.
I just mentioned them because they’re microblog sites, so in theory they do the exact same thing as Mastodon. The number of Mastodon users doesn’t matter; the number of people on Fediverse platforms compatible with Mastodon matters.
So Lemmy users are not very helpful, but Mbin users maybe more so. Or Friendica.
The point is just that the number of Mastodon users is, in theory, irrelevant, as you don’t just communicate with Mastodon users. Maybe misskey was a bad example, I don’t know anything about it.