this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Don't think that meta turning into even more of a global social megacorp that controls everything a lot of people seee and interact with day to day is a good thing tbh.
Yeah - stuff like this should REALLY be public infrastructure
I know a lot of people are opposed to the state running things but I really wouldn't mind if there was a well-managed state-run federated instance for all of this
at least with Matrix Europe is already doing something like this since it's the de-facto-standard for a lot of the internal chats - but there really needs to be a push to make it more popular.
Having the kind of "lock-in" that Meta has where their userbase alone is an argument of using their service is horrible since it makes every competition futile...
From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.
A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.
No reason the state can't run their own Mastodon instance. Then they don't have to moderate anything except the comment sections on their own pages, but everyone can consume the content as they please.
I live in a region of the US recently effected by a freak natural disaster. The US Army Core of Engineers announced at 2AM last night that they might have to release water from a dam, adding to the floodwaters in an already flooded downtown near me. On Twitter. Which you can't view unless you create an account, and even then you might get rate limited. That's not an acceptable availability for a public emergency announcement.
Yes, having state-run instances of federated social media would be an excellent way to both legitimize the fediverse and remove some of the control that these mega-corporations have. There's no reason why privately- or corporate-run instances could not exist alongside these instances, and would still serve to combat potential state or corporate censorship.