In response to Joe Biden and the White House enabling ActivityPub federation via Threads, a number of people asked: “Why didn’t the White House just self-host their own Mastodon server?”
Here’s some very basic musings on what it would take for that to happen. and what some of the hurdles are. Don’t consider it a definitive answer, but a jumping-off point.
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The German government has been doing it for their various agencies for years
They saw Facebook a national security threat and Twitter getting bought by a censoring fascist was the final straw for a lot of German ministries to switch to accounts on the German government run Mastodon instance.
Also the Dutch…
One thing that people seem to take for granted is that these government-hosted instances would be open to the public for account creation, while this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Not everyone can get a statedepartment.gov email address. Not everyone needs to be able to get a @statedepartment.mastodon.gov handle. Just leave it to public officials only.
I think your points are valid. There is still work to do to enable government amd corporate agencies to easily operate their own domain in fediverse. There are projects and server hosting providers that are making that easier but realistically we need to see those services become much more integrated with existing social media, website and email management tools ( Think software like Hootesuite, SproutSocial, HubSpot on the client side and GoDaddy, AWS, Azure, 1&1Ionos on the server side ) that include managed activitypub services to SMEs and corporates and a way of managing them. I see these being like email accounts, only available for use by the domain user but can exchange content through federation. Moderation in these cases is just like dealing with Spam (Which email providers already do) - I know these approaches mean that at the infrastructure level there is a tendency back to centralisation but the difference is that there is no lockin. A company/org/Person can take their website / domain to whatever infrastructure they want.
