The EU already has one for anyone interested https://social.network.europa.eu
Other governments:
Hope a gov.uk one comes through someday
Could they? Yes. Of course they could.
Would they? IDK.
Should they, though? I don't see how it would hurt anything.
Personally I think the biggest hurdle will be moderation and defederation as it pertains to the first amendment. I believe there was already a supreme Court case where blocking a user on Twitter (from an official govt account) was deemed unconstitutional. This precedent might mean a govt instance is not allowed to defederate with any other server unless they defederate with all(?) This is pure speculation on my part, but I can guarantee it would go to the courts.
I think it would make sense to allow blocking users and entire instances that are very clearly not American based and thus don't have the same rights here, but obviously should be open to all Americans since we'd be paying for it, presumably.
I was wondering the same thing. It seems more proper to run a separate government Mastodon server. Otherwise, they're showing preferential treatment to one company.
Although... they probably can't handle self hosting? But really? The all mighty US can't self host a server?
If you don't think some Lemmy instances are being run from Fort Meade and Quantico, you're not paranoid enough.
They'd just pay a contractor to stand up a server on azure or AWS. Most of the labor would be moderation which is probably why they won't do it.
They couldn't remove anything without Republicans crying censorship. And because it's government run, first amendment protections apply. Which means they couldn't remove a lot of what moderators already do.
remove anything
Uh, a US Government mastodon server wouldn't have any way to sign up and comment. I assume it would be all one way announcements.
Who cares about randos who want to talk to the president? People were posting dead bodies on Biden's announcements on Threads.
Other governments have done it, even the BBC have as well
5 years ago the courts ruled that Trump could not block Twitter users on first amendment grounds. This same ruling could be used as a foundation to force a future government Fediverse server to federate with any other server and host all their unmoderated comments.
With Twitter, a user could still break the TOS and get banned. With a Fediverse server... Not so much. It's as free as sending an email to the US government filled with nothing but 2mb of racial profanities.
I don't think the First Amendment would ever require the government to host private speech. The rule is basically that if you host private speech, you can't discriminate by viewpoint (and you're limited in your ability to discriminate by content). Even so, you can always regulate time, place, and manner in a content-neutral way.
The easiest way to do it is to simply do one of the suggestions of the linked article, and only permit government users and government servers to federate inbound, so that the government hosted servers never have to host anything private, while still fulfilling the general purpose of publishing public government communications, for everyone else to host and republish on their own servers if they so choose.
Yeah, I don't have a complete answer here. I think that Terms of Service requiring standards of behavior are quite reasonable - people in Congress, for example, are required to conduct themselves to a certain standard or be ejected. Same goes for courtrooms.
There may be a "minimum threshold" for content or communities that are blocked, on the basis of materials provided (hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, CSAM), but I'll readily admit that this is conjecture.
a number of people asked...
The same number of people forget just how well the government does tech.
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