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by DeadSuperHero 813 days ago
I'm actually writing a piece about this today for We Distribute. The long and short of it is that it's not impossible, there's just a lot of red tape.

Whether it's a government entity, or a large corporation, you're going to have the same issues with procurement:

* Finding software that fulfills requirements on auditing and security requirements.

* Selecting a vendor that fulfills a laundry-list of contractual obligations / legal requirements. They'll need to honor comprehensive Service Level Agreements for government access, and be proactive in patching, deployment, and mitigation.

* Integration with a government-grade Single Sign-On solution like ID.me

* Onboarding resources for agencies and individuals, plus tooling for social media teams

* Setting policies that respect the First Amendment, while also moderating things like hate speech, pornography, etc

The other hurdle for this is funding and staffing to run all of this.

None of this is necessarily impossible, and I think something like this could be really beneficial. But, I don't think the ecosystem of the Fediverse (from a platform or vendor perspective) is necessarily there yet. I'd love to be proven wrong.

4 comments

Speaking as someone who does the technical bits of these kinds of integrations/implementations under FedRAMP, the technical issues are not the real barrier, the real impossibility is the last item, policy. There is no path to a successful/sustainable moderation policy in a non-corrupt administration.
Seems like a standard laundry list of requirements and hoops that would need to be jumped through for any other software / service. If they can do this for their email, accounting, database, nuclear submarine, etc. software I'm sure they could do it for some "social media" software.
Let's drop the requirement that the server is from a "official" .gov domain, wouldn't it be possible to be operated by some NGO-type entity?

Another possibility... couldn't this be operated by PBS, which would then have an extra audience and potentially create new ways to generate revenue?

Technically, yes, that's totally doable. However, whatever NGO is operating the instance would still have to get buy-in from administrations and officials that this is the server to join. You'd still likely have contractual and service-level obligations.

But I'd imagine that it's probably less red-tape than a government entity self-hosting their own Fediverse infra.