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by cmelbye 1080 days ago
The advantage is that the information can be aggregated along with posts from other sources rather than having to visit many different websites individually. It's easier to consume, the same reason why RSS was useful.
1 comments

This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks. So this just becomes "if you're a twitter user it's easier than RSS". Yet you still have to create another account to join the fediverse, then another for threads, then another for facebook, list goes on for each network that pops up and gains usage.
That’s the hard part about standards. I’m not sure how a standard can become one without people taking a chance on it.

Case in point: You actually do not need to create another account on Threads - it interoperates with this standard. Citizens will be able to follow information from the Dutch government on that platform.

Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads. Which kind of illuminates my point, for this to become standard we need far better implementation details than what activitypub currently describes. Until that happens, this is just another "social network" to join and keep up with, or ignoring it entirely to rely on some other social network.
> Technically, they need an instagram account to follow the dutch government on threads.

I think that's a misunderstanding or two. An Instagram/Threads account is one potential way "to follow the Dutch government" - actually this is hypothetical, as the threads/mastodon interop is also hypothetical at present, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36669480 .

An account on any public mastodon server is a second way to follow the Dutch government, and should work today much better than the first way. it doesn't need to be "on threads".

GETing the correct rss feed url on their mastodon server is a third way. You don't even need a mastodon account or any other account, but you have to "pull" the content, it's not pushed to your feed.

Finding out which other social media they broadcast to and following them there is possibly a fourth way.

> This advantage doesn't work out when the officials are constantly splitting themselves around different social networks.

The social media department of any large org would have active accounts on all of the social media in order to get a message out. That's how it is already, not sure what your objection to mastodon, where they own the instance, is.

There is also RSS. https://www.government.nl/rss

Effective outreach means being everywhere people are. It has to be “all of the above” because no one method of distribution captures everybody

> Effective outreach means being everywhere people are.

I can agree with that.

Interesting to see social network reach in the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1224092/leading-social-n...

Meta rules the top 4 spots.