FOSSDLE PieFedAfter a year of operation, Switzerland's government closes its Mastodon instance
submitted by Yorick
www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienm…
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.
Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.
9 out of 10 porn bots prefer X
From what I saw it was actually rising. A lot of Brazilian signed up when X was banned in their country and all the indicators are going up it seems. I don’t know where they got their numbers, to me it feels like they needed an excuse to cut costs.
I saw mastodon had a slight bump when that happened, but 90% of them went to bluesky. They got like 3 3 million users in 2 days. Mastodon got like .......a few thousand?
a few hundreds at most I would say.
Even if, they don't really speak English, let alone German. You can see it on Bluesky that the majority of posts are in Portuguese.
It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Both fedidb and other sources say the number of users are only going up.
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.
Yeah it's no wonder as Bluesky seems to work better as an alternative.
Until they run out of VC money.
Then the enshittification happens, to pay the bills.
Yeah, not unlikely. Can't truly know ahead of time of course, but it feels like that would eventually happen. I wish governments in particular had jumped harder onto Mastodon, slowly moving attention there.
But it's probably also difficult to justify, because from their perspective it's just one "someone else's solution" vs another. They'd have to first make their own twitter like fediverse software I bet.
The EU at least is still sticking around, which is cool.
I have to say I'm a believer in slow growth here. It wouldn't be good if one Mastodon server completely dominated; neither would it be good if Mastodon as a software was the only viable alternative. Right now we're in a great spot where a bunch of different solutions are being developed.
I think this development is healthy, and it be depends on slower more organic growth. And it might not be a linear process, but eventually I believe activitypub integration will be as obvious as having an RSS feed. Doesn't matter much if it takes a while to get there.
On that note it would be good if governments didn't just sometimes use Mastodon, but rather integrate activitypub into their actual web sites.
Better in what way? Format wise? Does it have better apps?
No I mean it seems to work better as an alternative. Quite a few smaller companies, content creators and so on I want to see enws from are on there, so it somehow seems to work better for them. 🤷♀️
Deleted by author
Bluesky is federated right? You will still have to check what the host allows. I get the impression the only reason there are more normies is because of the celebrity of Jack Dorsey.
could be federated, but it is not. As of now it is just twitter 2.0
If you speak Portuguese maybe.
How do you mean? It's majorly US centric, and that was part of why Mastodon worked better as a Twitter-replacement here in the EU at first.
But as always, something like Reddit or Twitter *benefits* from centralization, as far as user interactions go. So slowly, people drift to whatever the single largest alternative is when they leave the current status quo, and in alternative-Twitter-land, this seems to be either Threads or Bluesky, and their cases are fairly incomparable.
Doesn't make it the perfect solution, but like always in Engineering, the perfect solution is rarely the best one.
It has pretty much stagnated in the English speaking part of the internet, and only saw a huge boost in popularity in Brazil recently (due to Twitter being newly banned there).
I had a look at it a while ago and almost everything I searched for was in Portuguese. Not a big issue for me since I don't really understand and consequently not use those type of platforms anyway but I kinda felt that would probably stop a wide adaptation with English speaking people.
I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn't even take the browser config into account.)
Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.
Repeated the test now (Friday, 18:30); same lang settings as above. Couldn't find a single post in Portuguese after rolling across ~30 of them.
x.com and twitter.com are still inaccessible here.
"We've also closed the wheelchair ramps as the stairs are more popular."
Sometimes avoiding corporatism or maintaining your privacy feels like an accessibility issue (I'm looking at you, open source projects who direct their community to Discord).
It's accessibility, and it's also sovereignty.
Another way of rephrasing this decision is "we have decided to stop publishing information on our official website, as we receive more interaction on X". Which is pretty questionable.
This is surprisingly very common. Even for stuff that prioritise privacy. The interesting part is why discord is kept under the covers by everyone - despite its security offences, and anti-user practices.
There isn't much talk about discord like there is about browsers. However, it might be just an undeveloped branch of the oss community.
A good quality open source "federated discord" would be as important as lemmy or mastadon. But there isn't much hype around it. Afaik matrix is still far behind discord quality wise and the architecture has limitations for anonymity and encryption.
Discord is just high quality and so easy to use because making a server is so easy.
We stopped developing quality self-hosted forums and somehow now everyone is all over live chats. Chat is the worse form of communication to create permanent records of support issues. It's the flipside of Wiki's problems. They use hidden wikis to host discussion of wikipedia articles, moderation and other topics and the thing is a nightmare because it is not suited for conversation. FOSS development needs something that can do both. Live group chat for general discussion, with a static discussion forum for single issues, and a wiki where it can all be archived as structured articles. There's currently nothing popular that fills the bill.
Yeah. Discord can create FAQ and "threads" now that I believe work better for this. You can take some question and the answer and discussion and put it in a threat in some channel for issues. Presumably once you have a quality chat server, it is easier to add threads / articles / issues to it than starting from a forum.
What are you smoking and can you share the contact info of your dealer?
As a disabled person I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to use.
People on mastodon have a choice, it’s an awful choice which comes with privacy and contributing to corporate trash, being advertised at non-stop compromises, which in my opinion no one should have to make.
But you can still see it. Disabled people just straight up can’t use the stairs. It’s not that it’s a shit compromise for us. It’s that we are physically unable too.
With these sites its actually not even a metaphor at all. Its a literal accessibility issue because closed sites like twitter and reddit dont allow open API access for apps building features for blind or deaf people.
Yes definitely for hard of hearing and hard of sight people it can be an accessibility issue. I’m mostly deaf myself.
But comparing the situation for abled people in the way it was above doesn’t really work.
I dunno. You could throw yourself down the stairs. It's an awful choice, but you could still do it...
The point is, a choice with all kinds of negative consequences to it isn't really a choice.
I can’t throw myself up the stairs. Go in g down isn’t the problem, I could scooch down on my bum. (but then I would need someone to carry my wheelchair down).
Agreed. By @FundMECFSResearch's distinction, you (well, Americans) could choose to not pay taxes. You literally are able to not do it. Of course, you then have to deal with the consequences, but it falls in the same category of "optional."
Gender-affirming surgery is "optional." Eating food other than cat food is optional. Simply having the ability to make a choice between two options is not sufficient to justify saying both options are satisfactory.
The term “accessibility” is not the exclusive domain of the physically disabled. Accessibility affects all people across race, gender, class, age and disability.
That’s not the point I was making. Just that the wheelchair ramp comparison doesn’t work.
Maybe they should have done a better job talking about mastodon
I think the so-called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are a major problem of our time, because they are often defined incorrectly or misunderstood. All too often, decision-makers seem to think that the pure number of followers, for example, or engagement metrics such as likes would indicate that an account or post is successful. However, this is often not the case when other important metrics are taken into account. In e-commerce, for example, a large number of followers or high engagement figures in themselves mean nothing at all: it is not uncommon for e-commerce companies to invest a lot of money in social media management and for the KPIs of their accounts to rise accordingly - but still not sell anything via this channel (that means that the investment is not worth it, of course, because the costs are disproportionate to the sales generated; the ROI is often not good at all). I think a similar situation can be assumed for many science accounts on Mastodon, for example. Although the number of followers maybe not very high here because there are less active useres, the quality of comments can still be a lot higher. But unfortunately this cannot be quantified, or at least not easily. I therefore think that everyone should first think about what they want to achieve with their social media accounts. It then makes sense to define suitable KPIs instead of being impressed by what can be considered an indicator of success elsewhere and in a completely different context.
They all fall for turning KPIs into goals. When KPI become targets, they stop being KPIs. They often forget that KPIs are supposed to be used for informing the evaluation of desired outcomes, they aren't outcomes on themselves. At most they could be activitie's outputs. There are also many more stats and information that can feed the evaluation of outcomes that aren't KPIs, and qualitative evaluations are most definitely a must.
The irony is that all it would take is one high profile person or a nation state to commit to using Mastodon, and slowly you would see the numbers start to increase. People are actively looking for an alternative to Twitter, it's just that the vast majority of people have no idea that Mastodon, Lemmy, or the Fediverse on the whole exists. That's a double edged sword. Better content moderation with lower numbers, better social media infrastructure building becomes the norm with greater numbers.
Um, nope.
George Takei is on Mastodon. I've yet to see masses of Trekkies piling into Mastodon.
Greta Thunberg is on Mastodon. There has never been a huge influx of FFF members. Or Zoomers, for that matter.
The Dutch government has its own instance. The Federal German government has its own instance. Doesn't lure anyone into the Fediverse.
Mastodon is too hard for common folks and still miss some functionality. It is unfortunate none has forked it yet into something better and mastodon keeps being the largest platform by a far amount.
The Fediverse is not only Lemmy and Mastodon. Even the microblogging side is not only Mastodon.
Mastodon itself has a whole bunch of forks such as Ecko, Hometown and the very popular Glitch.
There's also Pleroma with its probably even more popular fork Akkoma.
There's Misskey with literally dozens of forks, including but not limited to Firefish (formerly Calckey), Iceshrimp (its rewrite Iceshrimp.NET won't be a fork anymore, though), Sharkey, CherryPick, Catodon etc. etc.
If you want something with more power, something that's much more like Facebook, there's Friendica and has been since 2010.
If you want something with vastly more power, think Facebook meets WordPress meets Google Cloud Services meets Fandom etc., there's Hubzilla. Whenever someone thinks "the Fediverse" needs to introduce a certain new feature just because Mastodon doesn't have it, chances are Hubzilla has had it for longer than Mastodon has even been around.
And so forth.
I know all those projects (I host akkoma, besides this lemmy instance) but still my point stands, everyone new to the fediverse will first get in touch with mastodon and its bad design because it is by FAR the most popular platform.
imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram
Countries will get what they want from X or Instagram either way, see Brazil.
Switzerland doesn't have the same sheet weight Brazil has.
And it probably doesn't wants to ruffle big US tech companies with so many having their big European HQs in Zurich.
Having a physical HQ is a huge advantage for a country to have here.
It's still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn't block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.
They're complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?
It's still on and will close at the end of the month. But yes I'm very annoyed that they didn't share much of the instance outside a small notification on the admin.ch website. But the goal of this whole pilot test is that if Mastodon became big within the year, they would already have an instance running with officials accounts. But instead I guess they will focus on Bluesky.
Sad to hear
@Skunk@jlai.lu @joelthelion@lemmy.world @FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone FYI
Sad but unfortunately fairly justified. Hard to justify spending public money on 3,500 users.
How much funding does a single software instance serving 3500 users really require? I could probably run it off my desktop.
When you're a government, you need a little more process to ensure things are done well (moderation, security, ...). Even something simple like that could take valuable time from quite a few people.
You do. But the point stands, on the scale of a govt budget, having a single full time employee (and even that is honestly overkill) is a drop in the ocean.
J'ai quand même l'impression qu'ils auraient pu prévenir avant de prendre leur décision. Ça aurait encouragé les gens à suivre le compte, et aurait pu montrer la réactivité plus organique du Fedivers par rapport aux réseaux sociaux corporate
Vraiment dommage :(
Decisions like these are why they can't move away from proprietary platforms. How much does it really cost to host and maintain this? A single employee could host a mastodon, peertube, and lemmy instance. The employee could also work full-time on one of the projects to address issues.
They also only had 6 accounts on the instance - out of how many politicians and bureaus?
Anyway... shame.
Anti Commercial-AI license
The main cost is probably the extra workload put on their social media team having to publish to and interact with even more platforms.
While it's nice, I also don't think the government should spend time and money on a platform that people obviously don't use much.
I assume they'd use syndication software that could plug into mastodon as well as the proprietary networks. If they're already syndicating posts between twitter Facebook and Instagram one more network shouldn't be too much effort.
They've yet to be caught actually interacting with someone. They've run the whole instance as nothing but a shoutbox.
As many followers as they've built up in the Birdcage? With maybe 1% of users altogether? In a much shorter timespan?
And by running the accounts as pure shoutboxes with no interaction with replies that could just as well be unmarked crossposter bots?
I wish they were wrong, but they aren't. The top posts on any given day on Mastodon get ~100 interactions and a handful of comments. The number of active users on Masto has declined by ~35% in the last year alone. Not to mention Mastodon has way too many things that make it difficult to use and understand outside of federation.
I take solace in the fact that Zuck actually almost certainly reads my comments giving him shit about his AR/VR trash.
Yeah.... If your government is so poorly implemented you can't even maintain a mastodon instance, you probably have bigger problems....
Yeah, with that many users you need like $30/month on AWS...
The guy who set it up probably quit, and nobody knows how it works now.
LOL, like I write a same comment I got deleted on Fediverse but it lives well on Instagram and X? The arbitrary standard for the censorship in Fediverse is extremely bad.
Better a moderation system that has a few false positives than a system that allows nazi and fascist accounts to flourish.
The fediverse moderation is either nonexistent, having disinformation, Tankies and terrorist simps flourish, or being mod abusive like on Reddit where mods react selectively and based on their mood.
What is "Fediverse moderation"?
Simple! According to this thread, it is:
- an arbitrary standard of censorship - nonexistent
- constant abuse of power
- the Chinese Communist Party
It doesn't even need to make sense on a conceptual level!
Moderation that happens on the Fediverse..? I'm not sure where you're struggling to understand the combination of those words.
You do understand that the fediverse is not a single thing? Moderation on the fediverse is a meaningless term because it varies hugely depending which part of the fediverse you are visiting.
Feel free to report those on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
This sounds like Chinese Communist Party :)
You seriously think there's something wrong with not allowing Nazi and Fascist content on a social media site? You think we should allow a platform for those fucks?
The Fediverse is not one thing. It's a bunch of different sites that are interconnected. You can join a site that has strict moderation, or you can join one that has no moderation at all.
Personally, I'm not here because I think moderation on Instagram and X is too active. Rather to the contrary.
If you run your own server (like a country would in this case) you're the one deciding whether things are allowed to be posted. Of course that doesn't stop other people from blocking you. But the whole idea is as a sovereign country a private corporation shouldn't have a say over which posts are seen.
You can always make your own instance and moderate your own comments.
Be aware that no one is forced to keep federated with your instance.
It is telling that you consider moderation "censorship"
— vintermann, Hacker News
I don't know who this person is, but adding "Hacker News" doesn't give their words more credibility. It gives them less, if anything.
Imagine I quoted someone and, underneath it, added:
Both of these enjoy the same level of base, intrinsic trust to me: none.
I’m not citing the author to add credibility, just to give credit.
And I'm saying you're better off without. That sentence is ridiculous enough already, it doesn't need the source to make it worse. But good on you for worrying about credit, do as you will.
Depends on what you get moderated for. I once posted a question about trans people and I got banned from some Lemmy.ml community because they thought I was trolling them. I wasn't.
It's just sometimes hard for moderators to know what kind of person they are dealing with. But someone's posting history is usually enough to see if they are trolling or not.
Also what is trolling. It's supposed to mean that you intentionally upset people for fun. How can anyone know if it's intentionally or not. To some people, asking a question is trolling because they don't see why anyone would ask that if they didn't try to upset people.
So.. It's interesting.
My point is that the word censorship carries a connotation of trying to suppress certain types of speech. While that may be true in some cases, for the most part if I get moderated it's for an opinion I can understand or disagree with. In either case it's an opinion. I'm not a victim. On some instances though, yeah censorship is kind of a thing. On .ml, anything seen as not extremely left wing gets deleted or banned, and that's bad. But I can just avoid that shitty instance. No one owes me the "right" to be heard in every context.
The thing is, i think social media today has created a lot of censorship out of necessity. There are people out there who just aren't mature or intelligent enough to have a conversation without insulting or pushing people down.
And because of they, we all suffer. We get over-moderated, we get called trolls etc.
I think I would like a platform where people actually have to act like adults. But that's hard. Hacker news have kind of made it, but they are also well known for not being open minded at all.
For better or worse, the moderation policies of Lemmy.world is seen as "the fediverse".
Almost everyone decided to use that instance, so... It's the default choice still.
Then again, the only person in these comments actually using lemmy.world seemed pretty happy with his experience.
It would be nice if people had an easier way of knowing the level of moderation before joining a server. One idea could be for services like Fediverser could include an indicator of moderation level - for example "relaxed" if few instances are defederated, "moderate" if moderation is more active, and "strict" for more restrictive communities. Data from Fediseer might be useful in this regard.
That way the people fleeing Reddit because of censorship would know where to go, and the rest of us wouldn't have to be bothered by them unless we really wanted to.
The biggest problem, I guess, is that it's a lot of work, and I certainly don't have the time nor skill-set required. So people will just have to read their instance rules. :)
"The pirates code... Be more like... guidelines."
If you need to use X as an example of free speech, you’re on the wrong side of the argument bud.
For something to be deleted on the fediverse you would need to have no instance and no followers lol