Fediverse

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.

Maybe they should have done a better job talking about mastodon

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

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.

"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).

imagine being a country and having to be obeisant to the terms of service and moderation choices of X or Instagram

Yeah.... If your government is so poorly implemented you can't even maintain a mastodon instance, you probably have bigger problems....

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?

Mastodon use in on a decline? What a shame. I personally dislike the format but then again I barely used Twitter.