Eugen RochkoThe fact that you can follow the president of the United States (@[email protected]) from your Mastodon account instead of being forced to have an X or Threads account for it is a huge W in my book. Of course our team is fully available to help if they'd want to set up Mastodon on whitehouse.gov. I believe governments should not rely on 3rd party platforms to connect with their constituents.
Infrapink (he/his/him)@Gargron I agree that the White House should host their own Fediverse server.
Mighty Orbot@Infrapink The White House would probably love to set up its own Fediverse instance, but first they’d have to harden it against hackers, ensure it passes accessibility and archival requirements under federal law, and a whole bunch of other stuff that might well involve forking the server software to make sure it’s done right.
There are a LOT of federal laws governing how official websites look and behave, and a lot more bureaucracy to ensure it’s been done: https://digital.gov/resources/checklist-of-requirements-for-federal-digital-services/
Raven667@mighty_orbot @Infrapink There are also a _lot_ of constraints on the ToS that a government entity in the US could enforce, separate from what a private site like Threads or Twitter can have in their ToS, starting from 1st Amendment and working down from there. If it were easy they'd already have done it. Like what happens if someone starts harassing an account on a .gov instance, are they legally permitted to block them? A few EU countries have done it and can attest but they have diff laws.
@raven667 @mighty_orbot That applies to government ministers using non-government social networks already. There was a court case a while ago which ruled that members of Congress aren't allowed to block people on social media (but can mute them).
I don't believe it's a violation of the First Amendment to restrict social.whitehouse.gov to White House residents and employees; doing so would obviate a whole bunch of potential issues.