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.

  • abeorch@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    I think your points are valid. There is still work to do to enable government amd corporate agencies to easily operate their own domain in fediverse. There are projects and server hosting providers that are making that easier but realistically we need to see those services become much more integrated with existing social media, website and email management tools ( Think software like Hootesuite, SproutSocial, HubSpot on the client side and GoDaddy, AWS, Azure, 1&1Ionos on the server side ) that include managed activitypub services to SMEs and corporates and a way of managing them. I see these being like email accounts, only available for use by the domain user but can exchange content through federation. Moderation in these cases is just like dealing with Spam (Which email providers already do) - I know these approaches mean that at the infrastructure level there is a tendency back to centralisation but the difference is that there is no lockin. A company/org/Person can take their website / domain to whatever infrastructure they want.