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.
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.
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.
Better a moderation system that has a few false positives than a system that allows nazi and fascist accounts to flourish.
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 pirates code… Be more like… guidelines.”
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.
It is telling that you consider moderation “censorship”
— vintermann, Hacker News
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. :)
For something to be deleted on the fediverse you would need to have no instance and no followers lol